The Powers of Two
by aragonite
Summary: He was erased from his own memories, and what little he does remember is confusing and contrary. And yet he shaped them all into the versions of himself that survive to this day. A closer look at The Second Doctor, and how very vital he was and will be to them all...even if they can't remember him. Part 12: DEATH IS BUT A DOOR
1. One: The Season's End

ONE: THE TIME IS RIPE.

He couldn't regret a thing.

His first body. Of course he would be a little nostalgic about it; one never forgot their very first life. But he'd known this moment would arrive sooner or later—sooner thanks to the succession of opponents that kept erupting in their lives. If he had time to be honest with himself, it was a large reason for leaving Susan behind. Her memories were still so fragile, and any threat of renewal might re-crush her fragile improvements. No; renewal would remind her of her parents' tragedy. He couldn't change with her so close. They had to part ways, and he did so as soon as he was satisfied she would be well cared for. That young human was ready to die for her if need be, and of all his criteria that was the most important of them all.

It was only a matter of time. He felt it long before the last nonsense with the Daleks. They'd only pushed things along, instigated the inevitable earlier than he'd expected. The season had been harsh in the end, but it did end, and in a (beg the pardon), timely manner.

He had a slight but uneasy suspicion, a prickle of his long-lost prescience, that Daleks might cause him trouble of this nature in the future.

At the end of it, he was ready to go, to pass on, to deal with this worn out body. His friends were clustered about, fluttering with questions that he couldn't answer yet. So tired...there was nothing to worry about, not really. Best to go through this now, in the company of these quaint little humans. The sound of the TARDIS vibrated into his bones as he stretched out upon the floor. His hearts slowed, matching the tempo of the TARDIS. He'd heard of this phenomenon, but never had chance to personally witness it, even among his own people. When a TARDIS bonded with its Time Lord, they shared in the change together. Fitting, that the TARDIS, which he owed do much to, would stand as his own kin at the end, _be_ his own kin.

He _was_ sorry Susan wasn't with him, but she was with humans of her own now. They'd thrown their lot in with humanity, the two of them. What had been desperation and fugitive cunning had become something much more. Humans were primitive, brash, and fatally uneducated, blind to the Universe and equal parts ignorance and arrogance...all the reasons that would keep any self-respecting Time Lord milliparsecs away—they didn't even visit it save to demonstrate its _smallness_, the hopeless limitations of its many species, and to compare themselves in icy Gallifreyan superiority. If they used Humans for anything resembling a positive light, it would be to show the Universe that the Time Lords had been perfection upon the first, and the Humans, who resembled them physically in all ways, was the cheap imitation, a Cosmic Joke.

Earth was the last place they'd ever look for him—and better yet, the last place they'd look for Susan. He'd hidden her in plain sight. Even if they found him, they'd never dream he would have put his own precious granddaughter in the same screeching backwater world of primates.

The Change was coming. He could feel it; a sleepy lassitude slipping cell by cell through his body, surges that followed the pulse of the TARDIS. No pain; it was too advanced for that. An early Change was painful, he remembered being told. The lack of discomfort assured him that this was perfect timing. His eyes closed, and the floor felt soft, soothing,. He could hear over his double heartbeats and that of the TARDIS (triple heart now?) they were turning him over, crying out, worried. They were a constant trial with their inquisitiveness and challenges to his clearly superior intellect and they never accepted that he didn't have to answer their questions. Despite it all, they were dear things, more flexible than Time Lords. Susan had once told him, they only had one heart each, but they beat for the right reasons.

It was all worth it in the end. He'd tried so hard to do the right thing with his life. He'd done all that was expected of him after his brash youth before his family suffered further from his actions; he'd settled down and accepted the duties of his Family. But when little Susan came into his life he knew the troubles of his youth had only simmered; they were now boiling.

Susan was too much like him. She asked questions for which there were no answers, and Time Lords never forgot nor forgave such atrocities.

It had come down to the choice that was no choice. Stay and watch them break her the way they had broken him, or free her, even if it meant putting them both in danger.

It was more dangerous to keep her on Gallifrey. They would break her even harder than they'd broken him. How could he watch that young, fresh face full of wonder and joy crumple up with age-old horrors? How could he watch her age centuries overnight with one glimpse into the Forever, or run mad? She wasn't ready for the Glimpse. They had hurt her badly enough! It could take centuries and perhaps more than one body, for her to finish healing. From a bright, bold, eager and curious little girl to a fearful, timid and wounded thing. Oh, his people had everything to answer for!

But Time Laws made no allowances for the preparedness of the Novice. She had already caused trouble with her questions, and her beautiful toys, self-built, childish and lovely things, were considered dangerous hearsay for what they represented.

Time Lords did not "play." They were not frivolous. _They were Time Lords._

Go mad; be inspired; run away. Those were the three choices. But there was a fourth choice...one he could make before she took her Turn upon that gauntlet of legalized madness.

He was inspired to run away.

Sometimes he wondered what his few remaining friends thought when their escape made all the news. It wasn't as though he had associated with the best examples of their race Of course he would steal not just any TARDIS. It would have to be one of those aggravating, obsolete Type 40's. Too much personality embedded into the electrical brains of the antiques; over an extended use they had an alarming tendency to develop intelligence of their own, and bonded deeply with their Gallefreyan pilot. They had been out of favor for millenia, thrown aside for the newer, cleaner, brighter things that had data but no intelligence; extrapolation programs but no un-prediction; attention to detail but no joy of random happenstance or spontaneity and they never, _ever_ went where they were not ordered.

Really, if one is fleeing from Gallifreyans, it only makes sense to use their most embarrassing achievements against them. Gallifreyans weren't prophets, but they could calculate probabilities with their multi-temporal views of time. This battered old Type 40 would make them even harder to catch.

The fact that his first TARDIS ride had been in a Type 40 was just a coincidence.

The roar in his ears, his hearts, the blood in his brain, the drum under his skin...their voices blended with the Tidal Time; the lindos organ was blooming within his chest, opening like a flower, sending its messages to every part of his ancient body.

And he did feel ancient. Quite ancient, and ephemeral as the sands that blew about the base of the pyramids, or the temporal grains floating about the Rock of Eternity. He was changing, and hard though it was, he concentrated on what he needed to become...someone younger, definitely. He needed a stronger body for all this gadding about. He didn't _plan_ on running into Daleks; he was quite content to hide in the mists of Earth History and never, ever, go further than a few hundred years past the 20th century.

He didn't plan on it, but common sense dictated something like this would happen again, and it would fare worse for him if he wasn't prepared.

So he thought of what he wanted to be, guiding the lindos nectar into his own re-shaping.

Younger.

Stronger.

Agile.

He needed a body as clever as his mind—his old body simply couldn't keep up with his mental perambulations.

Size didn't concern him; cleverness did. A large body could cause more troubles than it was worth in his experience, but he left that open...let the lindos do its work without much direction (he was too inexperienced, for it was his first regeneration after all, to know that his brief mental side-trip was enough to send the lindos into making a considerably smaller body).

He was almost ready. Seconds had passed, his hearts blending with the grinding wheeze of the TARDIS. The sound helped him concentrate, took away any residual discomfort from the act of Changing on a cellular level. He wondered if the TARDIS was changing with him. No matter. It was witnessing his new future.

A flicker of mental wildfire: the lindos was in his brain now, repairing age-damaged neural synapses. He was a little indignant; when had they become so damaged? And he hadn't known? Most unfair!

Almost...almost complete...the TARDIS was grinding to a halt in his mind and body; marking the closure of the Change. He would temporarily lose consciousness, and then wake up, not unlike a rebooted computer, and he would start anew.

The last thought slipping across his mind, influencing the lindos, was a wistful hope of his subconscious.

It was the wish that he'd fled Gallifrey long ago.

When he was still young enough to have some _fun_.


	2. Three: Impatiens

THREE: IMPATIENS

Three loves his first self and hates his former self.

It shows in his temper, which is thankfully mellower than his first self, but at times he thinks his humour has never been more cutting and cruel.

He's more physically aggressive, and all the Venusian Akido and karate in the Galaxies can't change the fact that he's at his calmest when he's physically in combat of some sort. He compromises in a way. He uses the Akido more, for it protects himself and his attacker from injury. When the situation calls for it he slips to the more direct karate-but even when he's in the heart of a fight, there's a tiny grain of a voice in his brain, wishing there was another way, with even less violence. He trusts that voice even though he doesn't ask himself who it is from: violence is easy to dispense and often impossible to reverse.

He remembers almost nothing of the Time Lord he used to be. He remembers _everything_ about being One, but Two? Two seems to be...gone. He has the data of the past in his head; cool facts and figures but that's mostly all it is, and that's when those facts and figures _aren_'t contradicting each other. The emotional colors and multi-dimensional bits that differentiate a fact from a memory are simply not there.

His brain is damaged. The part of his self that was Two is not really in the data or the facts or the bits and pieces in his brain.

_Two is missing._

It's Two's fault he's here, trapped on this planet.

Good riddance, he says of himself angrily, and he says it a great deal when he's feeling sorry for himself.

The Council forced him into changing; he vaguely remembered they wouldn't even let him choose his own face! All choices taken from him, all the things that made him, HIM.

He tried very hard not to think of Jamie and Zoe, but there were little pieces of them all over the TARDIS and to avoid them he had to all but live in the Console Room. He'd scrapped the clock and chair into the deepest, darkest dimensional closet within range. Out with the old, in with the new.

But the memories still burned, artronic ghosts and whispers that reminded him that there was a bit of bravado in his demeanor and he hoped no one ever saw it.

They were little more than fragments, overwhelmed by an unbelievable pain—_oh, Rassilon, the pain! _ He shied from that memory at every chance—he couldn't hold on to any of his recollections of the Trial—it all turned into the memory of the _pain_, of the lindos flooding his system, unnaturally active, forcibly bursting open with all the finesse of a knife into a seed, or the touch of one of those Earth flowers, the _Impatiens_ species...swelling and ripening and bursting open when it was ripe at the lightest touch.

Only if one was too rough with the tender seed-pod, it opened anyway, the plant's autonomics overwhelmed. A seed too green to nurture its own life would be catapulted into its new universe, miscarried into being.

He was an _Impatiens_...forced out of his natural life...and catapulted into a primitive world such as this (nice to visit, horrible to live in), without the freedom to grow for himself.

It had been unnatural and infinitely, intimately obscene. Lindos was the saviour of the Time Lords. It was the bridge between a used up, damaged body into a new, healthy and vibrant life. Life! It was the blessed chance to start over, fresh to correct old mistakes and make new discoveries, gain more learning and wisdom.

A Time Lord was not designed to regenerate from one healthy, active body into another. Lindos flooded a weakened body, strengthened it and re-wired it; knitted bones together, spun nerve cells and honeycombed the chambers of the brain with the nutrients and trace elements vital to perform the miracle of new life. It also soothed the inevitably traumatized brain and softened the harshness of the experience, let most Time Lords sleep through one life into the next.

Lindos did not save his body. _Lindos attacked it._ It rampaged him like a firestorm in space, overwhelmed him, flooded his brain with fire and vertigo and his body knew it was not time; knew it was up against something as unnatural as a virus or germ or weapon, and met the attack of lindos with head-on resistance.

Oh, Rassilon. The memory of it.

If only the Change had just been pain. He could have borne that.

But they had watched.

He remembered the weight of their eyes as his cells burst and knitted; he knew the feel of other minds observing and the overwhelming emotion was that of satisfaction at his descent. They were changing him with their combined focus of will. Helpless under the ferocity of the lindos and the combined weight of much-older and experienced minds, he could only scrabble for some scrap of control through the ordeal that compressed Time to the point where a thousand years passed in seconds and fire warred with ice in his veins.

He intuitively sensed they had planned to shape him to their tastes all the way. It would make sense...and also explain that of all his emotions recalled of the Trial, a core of mindless rage burned like lava through the indescribable Pain.

If they'd planned to change him, to...to _tame_ him, they'd been too hasty. That rage (an unseemly emotion for a Gallifreyan) had shaped him, beaten them to their horrid plans.

They hadn't liked his fondness for Earth and they thought he would grow heartily sick of it once he had to live there. True enough, but they were also worried about his meddling so they gave him tasks. The indignity of it all, but he wouldn't break under their sentencing. To break meant going back to Gallifrey, head down and pride humbled. Their proper and obedient little Time Lord at last.

Even his choice of clothing had displeased them—not even clad like a decent Time Lord! His robes of office bespoke an honor of his race, one that he should have acknowledged as a superior being. They didn't know about organ grinders or their monkeys, but their reaction to his fondness for the comfortable human clothing would have drawn parallels.

**_Dress should be appropriate to one's station._**

He'd picked up that stray thought from one of his Shapers, worse luck. Well, when in Rome, do as the Romans, correct? He would continue to dress like a Human, and he would enjoy it. He took rather a grim delight in his wardrobe now. If he was an exiled and ersatz, honorary Earther, why not use the best Earth could offer? The elegance of the Victorian-Edwardian styles appealed to him, and frankly, suited his much-larger body.

_**One's conduct should be appropriate to one's composure. Always be unhurried, calm, and unrushed. Haste is imprudence. Haste is for lessor beings, and precisely why they wage in futile battles.**_

He was less panicky than he used to be, but he could move just as fast. His larger body fooled them into thinking him clumsy or slow. It was an advantage. They didn't think he was a fool any more. He was tired of being seen as a fool. Let them underestimate him in other ways. He was to be respected. His courtesy was a show of his strength, not timidity or a humbleness he didn't possess. He was going to meet all species head-on, with equal respect and get it in return.

He enjoyed the astonishment on the faces of those who fought him and lost, loved the shocked awareness come over their eyes—human, alien, android alike.

One good thing about being bigger.

He could _fight_.

And it felt good.

**_One's appearance should be restrained in every way. A Time Lord has complete control of his body and he should never forget this fact. There should be no impression of intemperance or frivolity in one's personal grooming. _ **

Odd thing about his hair...

Sometimes his mirror would give him a startlement. He'd be grooming himself out for the morning, and something about the sensation of the comb's teeth or the sliding sensation would inadvertently transport him to a previous time...where his hair had been the black of India Ink, not the white of Guernsey Cream. The hairs would be heavy and smooth and glossy, not like this spun floss. He quite liked its color—the opposite of his former cut, it was dignified and a pleasant shade of white; it worked at various lengths and he never had to worry about wardrobe colors and patterns. But there was a slight wildness that was uncontrollable and that it reminded him his hair might be the only thing even he couldn't really control...

Sometimes he pulled his comb back, intending to tame a cowlick before remembering, _you don't have a cowlick_. And then that thought would turn annoyed.

Ah, well. He still cut a fine figure.

_**A Time Lord is master of his environment, for he is superior. He does not mingle and sport. He does not form emotional attachments with his environment, his surroundings, or the lessor beings and objects around him.**_

If only he could adapt his TARDIS with the same skill in which he'd adapted himself. The poor girl was grounded, her heart all but crushed. He ached for her, wished she was back in the Universe the way she was meant to be.

But he could, and did, explore the primitive Earth technology and found himself rather in love of many of its bits and pieces. Children's toys, for the most part, but some odd little bit of Terran thinking, some sideways solution to a problem, would startle him out of his fugue and draw him into a brief foray into Humanity.

His First self had _hidden_ in the annals of History. Two had been _dabbling_ in History—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say History had collided smack into him, judging by how truly epic horrors seemed to follow him in that life. But things were now different. For the first time, he was _living_ in history. It was not an always unpleasant sensation.

His sonic screwdriver reflected the adaptations of his exile. Little bits of thinking and experience trickled here and there into its design. Sound was ever a fascinating collections of Laws for the Universe. Why not explore sound's potential as a tool?

He had always loved sound. Music was an expression of personal revelry that approached a spiritual mantra. He remembered a Recorder, but not why he'd chosen it as his instrument.

**_A vulgar, disgusting human toy._**

He'd felt the Council's disdain of it.

_**A crude attempt to higher intelligence; nothing more than a hollowed-out tree branch with holes drilled clumsily on one side. He could have harped the Solar Winds with a dryxl, or sculpted sonatas with a fine laser tynnal! He could have echoed the very heartbeat of the Universe with a quasar metronome, floated the pure musical notes of the crystalline Galaxies with a liquid ruby, but no, but he mocked his people even in this, with his primate's prancing stick.**_

He never played the recorder, never even looked at it gathering dust on one of his many shelves in the old Control Room. The Sonic Screwdriver was his instrument now.

Now he created music with an instrument invented long before the Human Race. He sang now, for his throat was both primitive (in terms of age) and intricate. It was the one instrument they could not ruin or confiscate.

He learned even the _lullabies_ of other races and species. And he sang them. How that would infuriate them if they knew!

He learned the music of other languages, effortlessly. The tonal values of Mandarin Chinese rippled and flowed in a mathematically pleasing poetry; the nasal tricks of Siberian Yakuts and he grew angry, terribly angry at the Bridgadier for pretending he couldn't speak Gaelic, that most noble and beautiful tongue.

He used his languages happily. He travelled the world's metaphorical four corners, a trapped tourist, and had the time of his life even if he couldn't admit it.

He could speak French, but avoided it for reasons he preferred not to think. He had absolutely no desire to go to France, and changed the subject whenever Waterloo came up. Thoughts of Napoleon made him twist up somewhere in the vicinity of her hearts. He understood that the Brigadier was offering the hand of friendship when he asked if the Doctor wanted to come with him to Flanders Fields, visit the science museums whilst the Brig paid honored to his dead friends. But the thoughts of going over there made him stammer out a refusal that didn't make a bit of sense and he locked himself in his TARDIS for the rest of the day.

The Brigadier left, and he didn't know if he was relieved or disappointed in himself, so he sat in a quiet corner with his Sonic Screwdriver in his large hands. He loved the reflection of himself in his Screwdriver, but it was by no means his only sign of mechanical attachment. Bessie was his favorite. There was something about her design that made him feel three hundred years younger, how eternally astonished even he could be that she could move with grace and agility incongruous with her shape.

They had stripped his mind of all the useful Time Travel information he needed to get off Earth, but they had made a mistake in letting him around the resources of UNIT. The Humans thought his absorption with Bessie was harmlessly eccentric; a hobby to occupy his time and energies when he wasn't working for them. If the Time Lords had hoped the human race would be a hard taskmaster to him, they were foiled. Compared to most of his "wardens" in the past, he was ridiculously pampered and spoiled. It was all in the attitude; they could be nosy and overbearing, but they knew he was willing to give of himself and risk his own neck to keep Earth safe, just as they would.

So he accepted their indulgence, and tinkered away, silently and magnanimously pitying the poor, simple minds that didn't know that machines, rocks, crystals and trees possessed energetic vibrations, paths of life and life-force. Only a few admitted they felt a machine could have a 'soul', but they were shy about it. Their primitive religions forbade such hearsay. This planet had far to go before the religious totality evolved to spiritual science on par with Tibetan thought, or Nigerian IFA, or the gemstone-bright shamanism that existed in pockets here and there throughout the sub-industrialized globe.

And yet they didn't complain or laugh when he referred to Bessie in human terms. The Brigadier once lifted a brow to one of his comments and walked away muttering something about John Muir that he didn't understand, but Jo beamed like pure golden sun and quoted the Rev. Audrey, author of children's books about living trains and how steam engines were the most human of trains. He scoffed, but he was gruff and he smiled. It was nice to get these unexpected little glimpses of common ground with another species...especially a species so different from his own.

He was learning about himself as he learned about basic mechanical wizardry all over again.

It was wonderful.

A shame, really, that Gallifreyans didn't have their children learn about the primitive basics when they were in school. It could be a relaxing thing, studying something as clumsy as a spark plug and glimpsing the burgeoning intellect that had first dreamed it up...took the dream and made it happen.

He loved visiting the Earthers' NARO satellites because the technology was a rare marriage between the most modern and the primitive. Rarer still, the marriage was a happy, peaceful one. Vehicles had to be Diesel-based rather than spark-plug because the sparks—as well as much forms of technological communication—would disrupt the delicate receiving dishes.

It reminded him that the success of technology often began with need for harmony.

And to be honest, a Time Lord would have never stumbled across the ingenious solution of "doing without"-they never did without! Here on Earth they took this fascinating problem and made it into a point of pride!

It didn't change the fact that he ached for his freedom. It made him irritable; he snapped and snarled on some days out of proportion to the situation, and his personal value slipped lower and lower until he was ready to rip his hair out for a kind word, some thing that would show that someone outside of Earth knew he was here...knew him and missed him even.

He wanted to know if anyone still missed him.

Susan he never dared think of. She was in his past, safe. The barest of stray thoughts might betray her, for this planet was not as isolated as the Time Lords had thought. It was a revelation that was as startling as it was giddying—well, electrifying would be a better word. Giddy was imprecise and he didn't like it.

And then another invasion of Earth hit. Then another. Just how safe was Earth anyway?

Perhaps Earth's very isolation and primitive level, perhaps its very undesirable-ness had made it very desirable for a certain disturbing faction of aggression?

Chilling thought!

Initially he'd thought of Earth as a limited refuge—the worst thing that could happen to them would be a natural disaster—earthquake, fire, flood, erupting volcanoes, even a primitive war was a better way to die than most of the possibilities lurking in the darkest pockets of the Universe.

Earth might be a backwater, but it was starting to show signs of catching up for lost time.

He wondered how much longer Earth would remain a boring, dull, monotonous floating prison.

Just the very asking of that question, when he was alone, made him a little nervous.

He felt responsible for these people—he was the most intelligent being on the planet, after all—someone needed to take responsibility! They needed guidance or help or both.

Oh, Bryxilititisscnichtr and Aggador's Hwuiniwitzl. Make that both.

Every night after work he sat by himself to think these bits and pieces through—Jo always popped her little head in to see if he needed or wanted anything before she left, and he tolerated this because she was sincere about her desire to help him. He caught himself smiling at her and toning down his voice for her more than he did the others—even Liz Shaw hadn't really conjured up that part of himself. She wasn't asking to help as his assistant or secretary, but as a friend. She reminded him enough of his old friends...Jamie and Zoe had both carried that same sweetness to their souls—a sweetness that didn't change the fact that they were all three tough as Martian fingernails underneath the sweetness.

Jo would have loved to know Jamie and Zoe.

He caught himself fantasizing of introducing the three of them.

And then he would sigh, wistful and gloomy, and remember his responsibilities to this little planet. Even if he could forget for longer than a few minutes, he had too many remainders to the contrary.

His grounded TARDIS.

The painful black holes in his memory.

The loss of his dearest friends.

The bracelet clamped about his right wrist to go with their dratted watch.

The tattoo they'd branded on his Second Self to mark him as a penitent criminal on assignment—they wouldn't let that go away with his regeneration, oh no. For some reason that bothered him even more than the bracelet. He had a faint echo of a memory or trying his best to get that brand removed...but how? What had happened?

He couldn't forget his humiliation even if he wanted to (and he did wish he could let it sleep in his mind at least once in a while). But he also knew why there were so many elaborate punishments upon his body, mind, and spirit.

Because try as they might, even the entire Council's combined weight of mental power, experience, questionable wisdom and ANGER against him couldn't give them complete satisfaction.

He had stood up to the Time Lords.

_He had defied them._

Even the memory of the pain and being broken wasn't enough to take away that drunken delight.

_He had defied them._

What was facing an army of Daleks next to that moment of courage? Sometimes he still couldn't believe himself. But he had, hadn't he? Hence a punishment of severity and cruelty almost unheard of in the so-called Enlightened Era of Gallifrey.

But he had stood up, and spoken what was right, did what was right, even though he wasn't the only Time Lord to think as he did, and say what he said, he had been the first one to say it in the courts of Time's Law.

_I was the first,_ he thinks again.

They chained him in this new body, chained him to a primitive planet, isolated him from his loved ones, and they'd chained him literally with the Time Bracelet and branded him with the Gallifreyan Cobra, but in the end of things...that was all they could do to him.

_He had defied them._

And he wasn't going to stop.

Why stop with just the Time Lords? If there was one clear piece of memory left intact from Two, it was his inability to stay quiet. In retrospect, how it must have infuriated the stuffy old puffed-up Robes in Office to see a Time Lord going against their policies, and causing such a bad example! When had speaking the truth become a bad thing?

He was going to keep speaking up.

And he didn't care who saw him do it.


	3. Four: The Freedom to Choose

FOUR: COMPOSITE NUMBERS

_Dedicated to both Tom Baker, who was amazing but frequently undervalued for the little sparkly bits he put in his role. Patrick Troughton is the first Doctor recorded in the (existing) episodes as offering Jelly Babies. (In the non-existent bits of THE DOMINATORS, there is a scene where he is scarfing down a bag of sweets in Jamie's presence, presumably building up his energy stores for another go against the problem). He offers other sweets in other episodes, such as lemon sherbets in The Wheel in Space, and treats candy as a form of actual sustenance, unaware they are nothing more than a quick-fix of energy for the Humans around him._

_Off-screen, Pat continued to offer Jelly Babies, as treats for the newscasters interviewing him and a scene exists in THE FIVE DOCTORS where he blandly pulls out a paper sack in front of the pillar and says, "Have a Jelly Baby?" To which Pertwee and Hartnell join in._

* * *

He loves jelly babies.

He remembers eating them on a busy, dirty little street in London, with the lumpy cobblestones pressing up against his toes through thin shoe-leather. He also remembers his first touch of that strange texture, a brown paper sack rendered soft and silky from constant smoothing and rustling.

Somewhere deep, there's a memory of his hot cheek pressed against a cool, blessedly cool stonework floor, and a gentle woman's small hand opening a small brown paper packet, pressing something small and sweet in his palm as the light above their heads sizzle and burn odd little sodium patterns upon the sculpted white ceiling and the centuries-old frescoed walls. He's hurting for reasons he can't understand. She's murmuring something just for him, telling him something that makes him feel better or at least...not alone. Above them, the Time-Clock gongs the twenty-ninth hour in that shattered second of Mind/Time, and after that he isn't certain what goes on. But it did exist and he wasn't going to go after it until he had nothing better to do.

On the nights when there is nothing but solitude, he sits up with a paper bag filled to the brim with the little sweets and props his boots up against the blank portion of the Console, munching away with his indulgence, his yo-yo, occasional scans from outside the TARDIS...and his thoughts. It's an equitable arrangement and it has yet to fail him. Just a quiet time with the TARDIS and himself, two beings gently sharing the same space.

Sleep comes less and less to him and he wonders if it would be one of those proofs of his approaching middle age. 750 years is nothing to sneeze about, but still. He doesn't like to throw his age around the Humans. They seem to mistake his greater years as proof of godliness or something just as confusing. Why humans would mistake the length of one's age with wisdom was beyond him, but every species developed at its own pace.

The Console rises and falls, sighs and breathes, and he listens to its unique music, tapping an absent temp with the heel of his left boot and letting his long fingers swim inside the bottoms of his deep pockets. It's cool here; he likes it cool. He's more alert in the absence of heat but he always remembers to turn the heat up to the point where it was cozy for his Human companions. Sarah Jane likes it at about 70-even.

_Jamie and Zoe liked it cold...She was from the Wheel, where heat meant fuel and fuel meant cost. And Jamie? Jamie was a Scot! I only heard him complain of the cold once, in the Himalayas! The three of us were quite good at 55 degrees, but Jamie begged for colder once in a while so he could get his blood going..._

_He told us a story once of two giants fighting over a stone bridge in his homeland. Ice and Frost...he liked it cold..._

The Doctor shakes the memory off, for it is very brief; its lifespan no greater than a Vetruvian egg fly's. He notes that factor of human adapatability again. He's grown addicted to cataloging and filing away bits and pieces about humans; trivia of what they have been known to do (and not do).

Life was precious, even if it had to be thrown away for the greater good. He didn't like it but there was no avoiding the facts. He also knew that liking or disliking had nothing to do with how many lives were spared or taken.

But he would always hesitate to kill. Always.

He remembers being told by distant voices that his memories would be erased...but the memory is one-dimensional and with no more feeling than reading cold words in a book. His diary helps, but there are (he suspects) bits and pieces not in it. He frowns, wondering if there is _another_ diary somewhere, but that thought is fleeting and he is distracted with another puzzle and he puts that thought aside and doesn't pick it up again until he's on his Seventh Incarnation.

Sarah Jane found a recorder in the old Control Room and he didn't even think of it as "his." He also found a broken Time Bracelet covered in dust, deep in a violently-flung corner of the TARDIS. There are some things one didn't have to remember if they didn't want to remember...and he didn't.

He rather misses his Last Self, but can't regret being an improvement. His First Self...he remembered being an old man a bit better than he did as a young one, save for that one and all-too vivid memory about the Hand of Omega. Memories of his days at school are beginning to hurt. He doesn't want to dwell too long on anything that reminds him too much of The Master. Romana was merciful and did not often make a comment or observation. Sometimes on his trips off-Earth something will stop him dead in his tracks and make him think of Gallifrey: the color of a plant, or the tint of a sunset; the sound of a brook inside a tunnel. These moments are needle-swift and vanish from the flesh of his thoughts just as quickly.

He's _busy_ this time around. No stranded refuge like back at UNIT, and if there's such a thing as a long-term and SAFE planet in which he can just stop and sit and take time with repairs he hasn't found it yet. Even Romana warned they were getting a little too active; they aren't getting enough rest. The poor Girl is showing the strain. Her wall colors dull at times, fading to grey and the lighting reflects the moods of himself and his Companions. When she tires he tires; when he sickens she diminishes.

It is so very hard to believe there was ever a time in which he didn't have this rapport with the TARDIS. His First Self certainly hadn't! Well, he _had_ been much younger in those days. Now the notion of damaging her parts simply to satisfy his scientific curiosity filled him with cold dread. He knew it had taken a lot of time and effort to build up her trust after his first self emptied her mercury.

He must have done _something_ right during his Second life, because he clearly remembered how his Third Self fought as hard as the TARDIS for the two of them to be free. They had combined forces together, Time Lord and Time Machine, confounding the static brains that struggled to control them. Eventually they had gained/earned their freedom, after that horrendous mess with Omega.

He has more Companions than ever, but Sarah Jane is still closest to his hearts. He even teased her, manipulated her into making herself better than she thinks she is capable of. Her primitive society meant she has had to fight for her self-worth more than she really ought; he's still pleased that she never ran away from him. He still regrets dropping her off and leaving her on Earth, but maybe some day he could pick her up again? Yes, there was always time.

"_Tears, Sarah Jane?"_ She had wept at his Change between Then and Now, the first Human to weep for him in...how long?

A long time.

She had cared.

He was touched, wondering for the first time if Humans could sacrifice their tender, fragile and delicate hearts for long-lived, hardened and admittedly hoary old Time Lords despite the obstacles between them. It was such a hard burden for these short-lived beings. How COULD they care about tiresome people like him? What was it about Humans that let them live in the Moment long enough to form soul-attachments?

Jo didn't run away, he reminds himself. She found another Human. He shouldn't be sad about that, but there are times when his too-accurate memory triggers that long, lonely moment in which he stood by himself at her farewell party, drank his glass, and drove away in Bessie. He'd offered to show her other planets in his own way, and she'd declined.

That was the risk with asking; you could hope for one answer, but get another).

Did she turn to another Human because she'd felt there was nothing in a hope for themselves?

Sarah Jane's example reminds him of the positive in Humans, and there are times when he needs it! They are his favorite species—absolutely! But they concern him at times, for they can leapfrog through the Galaxy without rhyme or reason and other species could certainly suffer in their wake. He likes that no matter how despotic, how totalitarian or backwards—even perfect a Human society could be, there is still no such thing as a Universal Hive Mind. There is always, always someone who thinks against the current and outside of the box.

The Human Factor, bless it.

He had been thinking of that indomitable element once, as Sarah Jane rested from that business with the Ark-more than a little dreadful, but Noah, thankfully, had survived enough of himself long enough to save his original people.

The Human Factor, he mused, smiling, seconds before a memory long-lost welled up in his brain.

Himself, _playing with Daleks._

Shocked, he nearly dropped his Sonic Screwdriver.

_What_ in Time and Space had he done?

Seconds later his brain had caught up.

Playing with Daleks! And yet there it was! Himself, _laughing_, as Daleks gave him a ride and spun in circles for the joy of being dizzy!

At first he thought himself temporarily insane -a logical assumption; the brilliant ones _did_ go mad with saddening frequency- but he glanced down in his memory and caught a glimpse of a smaller hand poking out of a too-large frock coat and checked trousers.

Ah. What a relief. He wasn't mad. It was just one of Two's mad memories.

Two's mental archives were usually more trouble than they were worth; he'd struggle long and hard in pursuit of something that _felt_ important, only to be baffled at the conclusion: Two was full of rather simple, plebian memories, of moments of warmth and comfort and all the delight of an overgrown child. If it was an important memory, Four could recall it easily (some days he felt he knew far, _far_ too much about Cybermen).

The whole paradoxical mess translated to the decision that if he couldn't remember it quickly, it wasn't important. Two's memories had not been stripped of the vital, _useful_ things like enemies, machines, science and events. No, the stripped bits were just not needed.

But Four's brain was a ferocious one, and it didn't take long to realize his memory wasn't damaged or recovered from a wipe by the Time Lords...it had just been buried.

And he soon saw why.

There was grief lingering inside the synaptic echoes that made up Two. He'd used the Human Factor to teach Daleks to question, and to know loyalty to friends. And after teaching them humanity he'd run off, knowing he'd set the seeds for the Human-Dalek massacre in his absence.

_You didn't have a choice,_ he reminds his long-dead self, which for the first time gives him insight to that mental schizophrenia Humans complained about. _It was a mercy that they died quickly._

And it was a good thing it was a memory, because if this _was_ schizophrenia, or a case of split personalities arguing with each other, he'd have to break the bad news to himself that for all his efforts on Skaro, he hadn't destroyed them after all. They kept coming back into his life, again and again—at least his Third Self hadn't seen that much of them—Three had dealt with the Master more than anything and no wonder he'd regenerated early. Koschei had a habit of sucking all the useful gases out of a room when he walked in. How someone could be so smart and so _tiresome_ at the same time...

Ugh!

Four muttered to himself, temporarily lost in the murk of his mood swing. Hadn't he thought enough about the Master? Things had been taut enough between them without his constant showing up and prancing about like some sort of Pre-Rassilon Lord. Ugh and Double-ugh. What was he trying to do, Dominate the Galaxy just to show you could be abjectedly evil and pose as the latest fashion model too?

Hmph.

His first self had discarded his robes of Office and his Sash of Citizenry at about the same time he'd taken care of the Hand of Omega. Afterwards he'd taken on the Human costumes. It had helped him hide in their midst beneath the angry search-beams that was the scald of Time Lord Attention.

His third self had flash and flair on the outside but kept a minimalism on the inside to reflect his recent interest in Eastern Thought (it did cross Four's mind to wonder _how _in the Blessed Names of Time and Space had his hyperactive Second Self found the opportunity to not only meet up with the Holy Man). A string saw in his boot and his trusty sonic screwdriver was the usual extent of things for Three. He depended on his hands and feet and combat skills and demeanor and diplomatic skills. It usually got the job done.

Something about the Master's smug, smirking gloaty-ness had grated Four the wrong way, like Christmas-tree cabbages, and he was now dressed in a way that made the Master cringe just a teensy-weensy bit every time they were seen together.

Great triumphs come out of the smallest of victories. He remembered how the Master had struggled to keep his composure and failed by a tiny tic in his perfect face as he took in the Giant Bohemian his arch-enemy had become. His clothes were comfortable, and efficiency should lead fashion, not the other way around. The Master's vanity had been fed by being matched against his dandier self; time to take that bit out of the equation!

Unlike Three, his pockets are full again. Joyously, gloriously full of things, but not just things he might find useful. He is alone a great deal of the Time, so he carries things that bring him instant pleasure and things he might need in a pinch. He's found an unexpected love of Earth food and drink and something tells him this is important to his recovery of something Very Bad. Something he really can't remember so he won't.

He pulls out another jelly baby, his restless brain latched on to the prop, conjured up the memory of his first purchase. There they sat in a London shop-corner in London and he's curious enough to go in and buy a bag. Oh, _ambrosia_. The marriage of chemistry and scent and texture is all the more terrifically, fantastically, gigantically _amazing_ because the Humans aren't aware they've all but bent the laws of the Universe in making something like this.

Jelly babies are absolute perfection: Earth could market this to Gallifrey as Brain Food. The sugars, trace elements and not a few tasty fossil-organic synthetic chemicals used for colors are better and faster than a psi-drug. And they aren't habit-forming! For Jelly babies alone, the Time Lords should re-evaluate Humans.

Their ginger beer isn't bad either but he'd hate to go to a party on Gallifrey with _that_ in the punchbowl.

(Now there was food for thought—literally. He should remember that the next time they dragged him into one of their terrible functions...)

A sudden smile crosses his face as he imagines many possible outcomes of stuffy academics with ginger-beer and jelly babies. It's an impish expression and sweet. A moment later it's gone, flitting to a slight frown of puzzlement as one memory skipped to another. Why did he keep thinking of the Brigadier and jelly babies?

Humans and their peculiar social dramas. He recalled his first days of Identity, huddled over the TARDIS board when Benton came in practically hauling the Brigadier in on his left elbow. He squinted his puzzlement, wondering what obscure and ill-translated Earth custom he was missing, when Benton elbowed the Brig hard in his ninth rib (oops, Human meant 7th rib).

"_Excuse me." The Brig cleared his throat and held out a tiny pasteboard box. "It's Switchover Night...a bit of a UNIT tradition and I wondered if you wanted to join in." Deeply awkward about it all, the Brig set the box down. Chocolates and whipped meringues, baked to delicate perfection in assorted shapes. _

"_Eh?"_

"_Easy enough, Doctor." The Brigadier steeled his shoulders to the straight and the solid, leveling him with a blackberry eye. "Would you like a sweet?"_

"_Oh. OH. I see." He caught on with admirable speed, and dug into his pockets for the proper response to this primitive Human custom of gift-giving. Ah, there it was. He beamed and produced the rumpled paper wad in his outstretched palm. "Would you care for a Jelly Baby?"_

_"Now, what made the Brigadier react like that? Anyone would think he'd never been offered a simple act of kindness before!"_

_Benton smiled but the smile was just as sad as the look on his departed superior's face. "It's a bit of a long story, Doctor. It just made him think of an old friend."_

_"Is his friend dead?"_

_"Oh. Oh, no, sir...just...where he can't talk to him any more."_

* * *

Four sighs through his large nose. He's remembering...why humans are his favorite species again. Why he trusted in hiding here in the first place.

The bitterness of his exile as Three is softening. With his recovered freedom he is finding more wonders in the Universe and oddly enough, he keeps finding Humans within these wonders. Maybe he could think of his exile on Earth as a training period. They were easier to fathom after long exposure.

Humans are simplistic to a fault, but when they get complicated on you, it is an utter whopper of a surprise. He finally asked the Brigadier why he would look at him so oddly when he thought he wasn't looking, and the man never turned a hair, as if he'd expected to be caught out some day.

"_I was just wondering if you ever miss your past selves." _Was the stiff and formal answer. _"It is a rude and personal question and I shan't trouble you for an answer. But you asked what I was doing, and that is my answer."_

With that the man marched a crisp about-face out of the room, leaving him feeling as though he'd missed something else. By accident his gaze had fallen upon the calendar and the date seemed familiar. Boredom made this miniscule riddle the most interesting event of his day, so he flipped through his diary and re-acquainted himself with an old memory involving the first time he'd met the Brigadier.

_**Underground. Yeti again. Holding a gun to him in the darkness, and looking down quite a bit because he had been quite a bit smaller that time around (Erum, hello, how do you do, I'm the Doctor...).**_

Miss his past selves? How could he? What an odd question! He was missing _something_ here, some nuance of Humanity, but it would be cheating to ask directly. He was certain he could un-ravel the riddle to the solution in time. Hmph. Couldn't they just be the funniest creatures. He settled back in his chair and pulled his yo-yo out for a few spins as the TARDIS did a few spins of her own.

A yo-yo keeps his hands occupied, and the simplicity of the toy is addictive; so much you can do with a string and a bit of wood. You can do complex things with the simplest of things, and that is why the yo-yos are so compelling. He wonders if these simple toys are the key to human's creative thinking. It would be nice if so.

For too long he and the TARDIS had been yo-yos of the Time Lords and he could be forgiven his occasional screaming outrage to the skies as he sat, stumped for movement, waiting to find out why they'd sent him here, there, and everywhere all over "their" balliwicks. Romana had been embarrassed when he yelled at them at the top of his lungs, but it had made him feel much better. Secretly, he suspected they were more annoyed by his toys, and that was plenty of reason to keep his yo-yo.

Play helps him think. It clears the radio static in his head (seems like it's been there since that bit with the Spiders), but there are times when his fingers stroke the smooth wooden toy, feeling the psychic warmth of the residual aura, and just the tiniest traces of Artron energy...when the grooved cylinder stops being a cylinder and reminds him for just a nanosecond that he held another cylinder once; long and slender, graceful and simple in its design.

There's something about the recorder that reminds him of his yo-yo...or vicey versa. He isn't sure, but it is important. It baffles and frustrates him so he doesn't bother with it too much and any way, he's too busy. There are always more urgent and important things to deal with. Disconnected mummified hands, Martians, and Daleks (again with the dratted Daleks!) for example. The list goes on and on. Even his big brain doesn't want to catalog it all. There are new species to meet (or "encounter" because "collide into" might be a better term but it isn't nicer). Sometimes he wonders how the Time Lords can possibly sit amongst themselves like bored choirboys, ignoring the wonders of the Universe around them because their studies are more important. Honestly! How often can one poke around the same old parsec for enlightenment? Once you've written your third paper on the discovery of the seventy-eleventh dimension there's just not much left to do!

His negative judgments against Gallifrey come easily as breathing. Something bothers him about trusting his own people. Even without all the mumbo-jumbo of his past experiences as Three and Two (he pities his second self, let's be honest). There's an absence of data that jars his Time Lord sensibilities.

If only he could remember the source of the distrust, but for some bizarre reason, his mind wants to send him back down to nonsensical paths—what would _Gulliver's Travels_ have to do with the Chancellor?

Well, his previous selves weren't always the brightest stars in the sky. That was the good bit of getting older, wasn't it? He was approaching middle age and he knew he was much smarter. Everything boiled down to Two's memories, and what memories he did have of Two weren't so very impressive. Cybermen, Daleks, Ice Warriors, Yeti, The Great Intelligence, basic stuff such as that. But it was to be expected that Two would avoid anything to do with Gallifreyan politics.

He avoided them as well, but the fact of the matter was, he knew they were cracked sources of information—blinded by their own Temporal Altruism for Gallifrey. Pity.

Sometimes he wondered how he'd managed to live to his fourth incarnation, and he would rub his forearm absently, where a snake had once been branded into his skin, before returning to his double loops.

Melancholy, he thought, using the Terran word because no such concept existed among the languages of Gallifrey. Just melancholy. He was getting older. That might explain his temper. Not a few people had commented on his cruel treatment of his own people upon his emergency inauguration, but he hadn't felt like giving them an honest answer. How often had they given him one?

As cruel as they'd been to him, what'd he'd done to them in return wasn't even a token courtesy return.

He rubbed at his arm again, caught himself, and tugged at his wooly scarf instead. That was better.

Maybe he'd been altered during his exile. Gallifreyans didn't really mean so much to him any more. He was throwing his lot in with Humans...but that made sense, didn't it? Humans were indomitable, but still weak, short-lived, frail, fragile...little more than delicate blooms of life in a bitter Universe. Gallifreyans, on the other hand, were anything but. They were physically superior, mentally elevated, socially secure...

_...inexcusably dull..._

Dare he say it, even The Master was dull. At least Humans were never completely predictable.

And the Master, Rassilon help them all, could be very predictable, the way you knew how the other chess player was predictable. It always came down to two players with 16 pieces each, shoveled across the game-board. There were only 318,979,564,000 possible choices in the first four moves of the game, and he was positive they'd gone through more than half of them.

But that last business on Gallifrey...that business had...smarted.

The Chancellor had been too polite, too self-assured when he looked at him, as if he'd known something beyond Borusa and the others; had known something about him.

Smug complacency and condescension was the default expression and demeanor of Time Lords, but it rankled him all the way down his nine ribs (or did he have ten this time? Must check! Maybe one of these days he'd wind up with a few more. Wouldn't that just _annoy_ the Loom Mechanics at Lungbarrow!).

Something about Goth's _smile_.

The Fourth Doctor grumbled to himself. He just _hated_ these nights when his thoughts were all over the place, never settling down but skittling about like so many solar winds. The only thing he could do was wait for the mind-storm to settle down.

And let the thoughts play through.

Flip.

Spin.

The yo-yo came back up for another go.

Bad enough he'd answered that Summons with all due haste and left Sarah Jane behind on Earth! He hated that! He still missed her, kept looking up thinking he'd see her in the doorway again, complaining about his lack of direction and bad timing. But no, he'd taken her back to her own people, and gone to Gallifrey because it HAD been an emergency and for what? A trap! They'd impounded his precious TARDIS! Because it was "no longer in service!" _Oh, the nerve!_ The indignity of treating his oldest and dearest friend in such a way!

One indignity soon followed the next, and why hadn't he been _more_ surprised that Gallifreyans were interrogating suspects under torture? But he wasn't. Being here again, among his people had started to trigger echoes of memories—not strong enough for his mind to collect and haul them in for further inspection, but real enough that they began to influence his thinking.

When you came down to it, that was much more frightening than being framed for murdering one's President, including the accusations, lack of belief amongst your own kind, and getting painfully, painfully questioned by people who didn't really seem to care what you said, so long as you were screaming.

Running for President under Article 17 had been a madman's inspiration. It seemed he was better at acting under desperation than he'd thought.

Yes...all's well that ends well, but he personally vowed to himself for all Regenerations to come to stay the blazes away from the Matrix and to never, ever, ever, ever, ever **ever** have anything to do with it ever again. Once was enough!

_Once?_

Oh, no. He wasn't going to pursue that ghost-question! No, no, no! No, no, no!

He almost slapped himself on the face to stop that thought, and took a deep breath of relief, returning to the original stream of thought.

The swift coalescence of events had left him dazed and battered. He left with the Old Girl. Time Lord and Home Planet both pulled deep breaths of Cosmic thankfulness that they were parted once again. Borusa, for one, looked ready to throw a fifty-year party even if it meant he had to spend his nephews' marriage dowries in the bargain.

For the first time, he felt his people were beginning to understand that it was better that he stay away.

Deep breath, everyone!

Four breathed deep, smiling to himself. Events were past. He was back with his TARDIS. He had Companions, friends, sleeping in the artificial night. Adric, thank the small mercies, had been blessedly diverted with a room of logic and puzzle games in one of his old rooms. The Doctor didn't go there; it reminded him too much of another young human, a girl who also had short, dark hair and deep eyes and an "arthimetical mind." He didn't have one at the time—Mathematics had been a frequent thorn of One, who hadn't gotten through the Square Roots until his fifth birthday (proof that no one was perfect). He liked numbers now. He knew inside his hearts it was due to a small, smiling little girl who matched his intellect with powers of her own. Sweet child.

The Console bleeped and he glanced up from another loop, saw all was well, and let his head drop back down. Where was he? Oh, yes. Gallifrey. He was gone from Gallifrey and it would be a dashed long time before he ever went back! The whole experience with the Master had done more than sour his tender chance of reconciliation with his people. It had knocked some sort of hole in his pysche: he was actually dreaming on the rare nights he slept.

Time Lords rarely dreamed, but since the President's murder, he'd a rash of them and he didn't like them at all. They weren't the mental _gedankenexperiments_ of a Time Lord, but rather, more like the phantomy dreams typical of Humans.

Repeating themes, he recalled, were common for Humans who needed to work something out of their subconscious mind. And these "dreams" were always the same: Walking over and over through an endless set of grey-brown corridors of a strange building in the dead of night when the Citadel slept. Humans said it was perfectly ordinary to be in a place you'd never been in and feel you knew it in dreams. Well, felt he ought to know these eerie halls, but he didn't. They were foreboding, and he was trying to move quietly, not be seen...always trying not to be seen.

Not to be noticed.

The Guards weren't guards at all, but giant statues sculpted to look like Rassilon's Chess Players. They lined the walls, stone eyes opened and unmoving, and they let him pass, but he knew in his dreams that if he did...something...something he wanted to do...every one of them would step away from the wall, stopping him.

If this was a Human Dream, then by Human rules he felt his own people were his prison-keepers, ever watching and disapproving, ever silent until he made a mistake before their stirred themselves to move.

That had to be it. Mystery solved.

Chilly as these images were, most of them ended happily. They ended with the hum of the TARDIS in his brain, and he would wake up from the dream and into reality warmed by that soft, sweet purr. They were a perfect team now, he and she. Bad as his experiences had been, he still had his TARDIS and she had him and he was doubly justified in stealing her. What would they have done to her if he hadn't? Scrapped her on some terrible heap like her sisters! Perish the thought!

No one would ever hurt her.

_Ever again!_

?

He frowned at that last bit, wondering where that came from, and rubbed at his right wrist.

Maybe nocturnal introspection was a side-effect of being around Humans? It was their natural spiritual state, proven by the overwhelming majority of their written literature.

Perhaps he needed to take a side-trip. Another planet? Some place new?

Yes...yes, that would work. At least he'd be someplace new, and that was the best medicine of all.

Four set the controls with a smile and a figurative wink, drawing co-ordinants out of the console at random, but playing it safe: wherever and whenever, it should be breathable!

But one last thought escaped: Borusa's statement haunted him, and haunted him still:

"_We must adjust the truth!"_

* * *

Much later, he finds himself swinging in the wind of a very different truth. The Master's laugh is still ringing in his ears, and to his saddened realization, he hears another ringing in his head with it.

The TARDIS is calling him.

He hadn't heard this particular song in...a long time.

_Doctor_, spat the Dalek.

_Doctor_, hissed a Silurian.

_Dok-tor_-from a Dominator.

_Something's wrong..._he thinks fuzzily. All the fatigue and pain and worlds-weariness has caught up with him; he feels twice his 750 years._ That's not my memory, is it?_

His first Change had been perfect, but he couldn't remember much of what followed it, just the Change that came after, all pain and grief and something that ended with the scent of heather against his cheek.

_Tears, Sarah Jane?_

Doctor?

Doctor.

_Doctor._

_Doctor._

_Doctor Doctor Doctor._

Oh, there they all were. How nice of his mind to show them again.

Doctor? Doctor... Doctor!

_Doctordoctordoctor..._

He hung suspended between life and death, and death was waiting.

_I had to face my fear, _he'd told Sarah Jane_. That was more important._

The Doctor recognized he was about to step into something completely, utterly new.

_His first Life had ended naturally and simply._

_His second Life had ended in violence and pain; he'd Changed, fighting angrily every cell of the way._

_His third Life had cast out his Reincarnation as a Mallow threw out its seeds in the blaze of wildfire: The parent burned, the pod saved. He'd ended in the ashes of battle; a good battle, one fought hard. The fight over, the victory won...and the victory over himself greater._

_His fourth Life was about to end..._

_Not of his planning,_

_but of his Choosing._

This time, he plucked himself.

And he fell to the Future.


	4. Five: A Man is a Sum

FIVE: The Sum of his Memories

* * *

Every Time Lord was a sum of his experiences...and bits and pieces of his past lives that had been proven profitable.

He found himself liking himself a great deal. He was comfortable in his skin even if he was less comfortable around some of the minds he was meeting. His clothes were no longer too baggy, too loose, too _anything_. He was dressing himself smart and cleanly. His clothes are nice, clean lines and the beauty of the things made by straight lines.

In his youth, he loved curves. Curves were the shortest distance on planets but straight lines remind him of waves; radio; dimensional planes. It was an act of rebellion to like them. He was not interested in rebelling for its own sake now. This is his fifth time around, and five is the atomic number of Boron. Boron is produced entirely by cosmic ray spallation, and that means lots and lots of straight lines.

He smoothed out the TARDIS and streamlined the Desktop Theme of his new Control Room. A part of him hated to do it because it meant really and truly burying that older Room in nostalgic mothballs, but his Fourth Self had been right; that old Room was incurably tetchy. Never sent you where you really wanted to go. The TARDIS personality was too entrenched into that small space. The Doctor didn't want to fight, quarrel, or BEG the TARDIS do do anything. He just wanted some simplicity to his life and there was no cleaning out that Room. Best to just start over, save the Old Room for spare parts or power and hope that nothing accidentally left in there decided to go wandering out.

Five prided himself on his progress. He was learning to let go of things he didn't need.

He catches himself in mirrors more often, which is a little odd. He's been quite vain in the past. His First Self had never completely shaken the Draconian sensibilities of the Time Lords: One must dress _properly_ if one expects to be _respected_. He'd had fine clothes of practical, ornamental and sentimental value, a signet ring and gold chain. After the encumbrance of Gallifreyan fashion the Doctor had found he could actually _choose_ what size to wear. He'd never completely gotten over that delight.

Something his Third Self had said once, about how his Second Self liked to wear their Original Self's hand-me-downs. It made him smile every time he remembered it, because he could also glimpse a bit of fondness for Two.

An absent academic guru applied to his First Self quite neatly. His Second Self was universally described as "Cosmic Hobo," which Three had been proud to coin. Three had been criticized as being a Dandy, and Two had muttered a one-upman to that, "Dandy-lion," in reference to his hair, and Four had been the only thing that could make Two and Three pause in shared, slack-jawed amazement.

Five couldn't blame them. Four had been...

...striking.

Of them all, Four could honestly say he was more riveting than the Lighthouse of Alexandria. That poor city...

Five let his selves have their Times, their moments, their identities. He was new, renewed, a slate cleaned up and set upright. This was the first time he'd been drawn to clothing for a specific purpose.

First chose to be respected.

Two chose to hide.

Three chose to warn others he was not to be trifled with.

Four chose to distract—not quite like Two, but the intent was the same.

Now he was free.

He wore clean, light, bright colors, summery and smiling. He liked trainers with his suit but regretted the silly stares. There was no reason for Humans' insisting that those shoes wouldn't fit with his clothing. They fit very fine, thank you. And the celery...what _was_ it with their funny notions? He _clearly_ remembered the Elizabethan Court carrying around carrot-tops for decorations! Ah, well. At least rosemary had fallen out of fashion. The Doctor suspected his olfactory experiences would never completely recover from that trip to Shakespeare.

Five studied his face in the mirror again, for a Time Lord naturally felt the urge to see his past. It was an exercise in contemplation that kept them grounded, discouraging that dangerous isolationist mentality so many of the Old Bloods were prone to getting.

His bone structure is the most like One's, except for in the hands—his hands are a smaller version of Three's, but absolutely there. There's a sudden quirk to his mouth and a short little laugh that's just got to be Four—it wouldn't fit on anyhim else.

Two...a kindly eccentric. He took that part of Two easily, but the only biological proofs that Two ever existed is in the eyes.

Humans joked about gingers and blondes. Martians had proverbs about the neurotic leadership-qualities in their five-fingered selves. Daleks had encyclopedias of language about anything that wasn't Dalek (and it all meant "destroy"), and Cybermen were paranoid about upgrades and deletion.

Gallifreyans worried about Lungbarrow Eyes. They tended to show up as an attribute of controversial and mad characters in sensationalist fiction.

And, ever since Two, the Doctor has always had the luminous, bright Lungbarrow Eyes.

Sometimes Five wonders if this is a secondary genetic marker, some sort of way to warn the other Time Lords what to expect when they deal with him. Like the bright colors on a poisonous Earth creature.

On Earth, poisonous things are usually the brightest. It's an evolutionary act of manners that really, other planets would do well to adopt. Gallifrey doesn't have that color conditioning and that's a shame. They usually pay more attention to smell but that often backfired. Most meat-eating species and not a few insectoids think Gallifreyans smell very delicious, and some of them would like to see if the flavor of the package stands up to the olfactory teasing (Androgums, ugh).

Tegan teases him for being "sweet as honey," always reminding him that Terrans have two sides to that comment, the other which implying that sweetness is not always to be trusted. He grumbles and scoffs and mutters and whatnots, but he's secretly pleased. She's much brighter than she believes, and that makes it easy to shoot her down but she seems to know there's more to his cuts than meets the eye.

Meets the eye... He stares at his eyes. They're brown again, but the glow of different colors are hiding beneath.

Five shakes his head at himself. He's a bit of a mess when you think of it. He'd like to be as smooth and cool on the inside as he is on the out, but he's just too much a product of his own past.

It took meeting three of his other selves to actually see what was happening.

* * *

Five is glad his Companions are asleep right now. He needs to be alone with his thoughts. He doesn't want anyone but the TARDIS to see him shaking at old memories and the fresh horrors from Gallifrey. What a debacle. Borusa...oh, that Borusa! Five _wants_ to pity him, desperately so! His grand schemes were all dust in the end, a madman and a fool!

But he can't pity him for long. Memories are too painful. In every Life he's been, he's always suffered the tyranny of fools, especially the greatest fools of all: his own people. They've battered his mind, scorched his sense of being, and violated him in ways too intimate for language.

They've kept him from being HIM.

And Borusa had put a new twist on it all, cut pieces of himself away from himself, making him sick and unwhole.

Five remembers fighting Borusa with everything he had, but that everything was sadly lacking. He was missing his past selves; they were separated, split apart and forced to other parts of this loathsome task.

_Oh, I will not serve you!_

_You have no choice, Doctor - I wear the coronet of Rassilon...It emphasizes my will and allows me to control the minds of others. _

_(((Bow down before me, Doctor.)))_

And he did.

* * *

"Doctor! Come join us! We need you!"

The little fellow saw what was happening first, the sickening recognition in his eyes clouding his face. The Doctor didn't even know who the three men were before his eyes. Borusa's lock had been far too strong, his mind accumulated with many, many incarnations of training and ambition, fed with Rassilon's Coronet to unnatural levels of psychic power.

"He can't...it's some kind of mind lock!" The elderly man with the cane had exclaimed, before turning to their other selves. "Concentrate! We must be one!"

They had managed, barely. Three had been a frozen statue the whole time but he had the collected experiences of the others and, controlled as an Akido strike, he cut the legs out from Borusa's Lock.

Together his three selves pulled him to their side.

His mind cleared the closer he came to them, and he began to recognize the himselves lost. The great icebergs had re-formed and re-joined the glacier of his being.

Strange...

Incarnations weren't usually friendly with each other, but he'd felt nothing but tenderness to him.

He turned, Three and One flanking his sides. Three was the biggest and a solid wall waiting a command, ready to protect his youngest self. Two stayed where he was in the back, One was turned to watch Borusa as easily as Five, and Five _stared_ at that withered-up, horrid joke of a Lord President.

"You see, Borusa? Together we're a match for you."

And in a moment of Time compressed, an entire conversation between himselves flickered like a firestorm.

* * *

* One's mind threw up a muffler to deaden any of Borusa's continued mental attacks and held it-

* Two's Mind **crackled** with pent-up energy...angry, angry energy, coiling up like a Gallifreyan Cobra. His rage was a pure core, contained in a small vessel too tightly for anyone to sense it outside of close range. The Doctor felt a temporal echo move forward from Two, interlocking with Three's Timeself, and-

* -Three tossed up his own additions to their first self's mind-wall, splitting a portion of himself to extending his awareness.

_**((Careful, lad!)) ** _Two's mental voice warned from behind him._ ((**If he knows how to mind-lash, get out of the way. I'm ready.))**_

_((Do as he says,)) _Three agreed, lightning swift. ((_ He remembers Me from my Trial. He'll not expect our Second Self to actually fight him!))_

_**((Hmph. I've danced rings around Ice Warriors that thought faster than him.))**_

((_That's because one of us is a natural at playing the Fool.))_

_**((Oh, so you admit you messed up when you said you felt something was wrong out loud where anyone could hear us?))**_

_((HE'S ABOUT TO SPEAK! BE READY!)) _One hissed, for Borusa was opening his mouth to announce the next level of the Game.

* * *

And Time decompressed; the conversation ended, but but the waiting remained. Five was too battered to completely remember what a mind-lash was; it was something in his forgotten past, but he knew it was very bad and that Two was about to throw himself into the middle of something awful to spare him.

Just as frightening was the fact that his other selves were going to let him do it.

* * *

"Perhaps," Borusa was conceding, unaware of the four-way communications humming on the other side of One and Three's shield. "But you will never overcome me."

We don't need to. Soon, Chancellor Flavia will be here with her guards - or can you overcome the whole high council? _  
_

Why not? I am Lord President of Gallifrey and you are the notorious renegades. We shall see who is believed."

_**((You'd think **__**one**__** madman would think of something new to call us after all these years,))**_ Two mentally sniffed his derision, and Five felt a flash of amused warmth from Three.

But Borusa meant it. It was a nightmarish repeat of his announcement in the Throne Room, seconds before he had overwhelmed the Doctor's already battered mind.

And then Rassilon stepped in, and the entire situation was rendered dust.

* * *

The Doctor tilted his head backwards, his mouth twisting in a funny little way to one side. In some ways he liked remembering meeting most of his selves, but in other ways he didn't.

Since they'd played Rassilon's Game, his memories had improved. He remembered things he should have never forgotten. He remembered why Earth was so important to him personally, and why of all the portions of Earth he preferred to be close to London—the city of Susan's new life.

He didn't actually go to Earth more than one out of every seven or eight trips, but he could if he wanted to. It was comforting to have this. Even in his exile as Three, he was never far from what would be Susan's home. He protected it, making sure there would be something for her when his First Self journeyed to the ruins after 2164.

Of late, Five is starting to feel a little..._odd_ about those memories.

He seems to remember doing something very urgent in London, involving Two and Three. Three doing something that involved Susan.

Well, if he would do what he would do in his shoes, he'd be squirreling up things London would need for the future. If they couldn't completely salve the Dalek Invasion, they'd need defenses, wouldn't they?

And they'd need supplies.

Depots...resources...

Knowledge.

He might be the most impertinent of himselves, but he knew how to stack a deck in his favor.

_**((Got to be careful, you know. Never let them see what you're really thinking. You're safer if they have to guess.))**_

That was Two talking, through and through. Sometimes he wondered how he could have had the energy to be such an outward buffoon and a clown, sloppy on the outside to cultivate the contempt of enemies and potential allies.

That style was for much younger, bouncier, less mature Time Lords, and that wasn't for him anymore, and thank goodness!

Well.

Perhaps just a little bit of Two's mischief was still in him...

"_You mean you're deliberately choosing to go on the run from your own people in a rackety old TARDIS?"_

"_Why not? After all, that's how it all started!"_

* * *

"_One day, we shall be back..."_ He'd said that to Barb and Ian at the time, and at the time he had meant it. At that time...he had been _worth_ reconciliation.

But he stopped being that man long ago.

Travel had changed him forever. His homesick longing for his planet and his people was not as strong as the truth. He couldn't return to Gallifrey unless they could accept him on his own terms, and even though he accepted every single one of them, the courtesy was not returned.

Gallifrey would kill him now. He couldn't go home to die.

* * *

Five blinked in a moment's shock as for the first time in centuries a completely new thought came to him. Someone had known, hadn't they? They had exiled him and stripped him of his knowledge of Time Travel, but they hadn't confined him to Gallifrey where he'd be even more miserable...

Or had they?

The Doctor scowled, his mild face wrenched in a growing unsettlement. What was he trying to remember? Now where did that thought run off to?

Said thought, dangling on its preposition, scampered merrily on its way and he chased it hard as he could in the corridors of his mind. The thought was slippery and agile and dodged-

_**((When I say run, RUN!))**_

The Doctor gasped slightly, for the Thought had turned on him, snapping out with a terrific volume of energy. He'd stepped backwards on reflex and the thought had taken its moment and fled.

Well!

The Doctor pressed his hand to his chest, feeling his hearts settle. "That was rather rude of me!" He muttered, still surprised. "Why would I create a time-sensitive memory-lock for my own mind?"

An excellent question, but the him who would best answer that question was not easily reached. Two was the least tangible of his memories...

...Hmn.

If he did remember events correctly, Two was the most approachable in the overlapping hours of his regenerations. That was a vulnerable time for all Time Lords; they often picked and chose extraneous portions of their new personality for the future, and most of their decisions were on instinct and foreshadowing. Time Lord prescience was rarely as sharp as it was in that soft, vulnerable moment of being. Not that his regeneration had been all that pleasant—he must have been half out of his lobes to confuse Adric with the Brigadier! But yes... The Doctor leaned forward in his chair, tapping his long fingers on his knees. He had the urge to go find a cricket bat and hit a ball around until he felt better.

_**((I was the first, you know.))**_

The Doctor's fingers slid off his knees as he jumped from the shock. "The first what?" He whispered, but the memory was already fading. He'd almost opened the memory-lock, but not quite. The time and circumstance wasn't ripe. Yet.

Bother, but he could be very annoying to himself.

The Doctor breathed deep for a minute, dredging up some of the more useful meditation exercises to come out of Tibet, and got to his feet. Enough of this shilly-shallying. It was time he went and did something. The TARDIS was always in need of supplies and he had plenty of currency. Why not go someplace quiet for a bit and just have a little rest, build up on repairs and equipment? He could at least figure out how to get the rosemary smell out of the food machine...and more celery for analysis. One of these days the Time Lords ought to put their over-valued brains to work and figure out why celery on Earth was so much better than the limpid stuff in the Gallifrey Hydroponics. He popped over to the console and smoothed its top with his fingers. "Where to go..." he murmured. "Where to go, old Girl..." Some place not new...how about a place he hadn't seen in a few generations? That would do it. Something old and something new... And to help the process... The Doctor grinned and pulled out his handy flipping coin. "Heads or tails?" He asked out loud, and with a snap of his thumb, spun it into the air.


	5. Six: A Number of Privilege

Six.

Where to begin with six anyway? He might be accused of considering himself perfect, but...Six IS the most mathematically pure and correct shape found in nature.

Six is the only number that is the sum of three consecutive positive numbers.

Quite an amazing, remarkable number all around. It is a number of privilege. Even the Cybermen appreciate the number 6 for its usefulness in their digital arithmetic, and 6 is considered the number of supreme power to the Ice Warriors.

Paradoxically, Six might be the number for the strongest polygon, but he is the least stable version of himselves. He's still settling. Everyone has a flaw or two; his was the sheer burden of his intellect as well as a power for total recall that at times overwhelmed his capacity to process empathy. Egotism definitely had its place in his brain. He was tired out of dealing with people who saw only the short side of things. They were holding the rest of the Galaxies down—and holding him down with them. The time for niceness and letting people evolve to their destinies at their natural crawl-pace is over. They don't have the luxury of Time. This is a hectic, terrifying lifetime and the disasters are only piling higher and higher upon each other. He hasn't seen the Rani in centuries, but she was usually the herald of some sort of scientific apocalypse. And the Valeyard? Less thought of, the better.

He's perfectly fine with being arrogant—it gets him his way often enough with little fuss and muss. But at this particular moment, Six is anything but serene. He is doing what he does better than any of his other lives:

He's fixing the TARDIS.

* * *

Surrounded by a clutter of tools, the Doctor's striped yellow legs sprawls out of the console's shadow, canary stalks for the bright red flowers of his spats. Much of his torso is serving as a table for a long line of delicate-looking instruments. His bright yellow hair gleams like the insulating foam, and he squinted into a small hatch from which hundreds of wires as spewing like so many intestines.

"Of all the impossible..." He mutters to himself. "How in the world—_who put square-braided coppers into a Hesphatean coupling?_ Hmn, that sounded like a catchy song, didn't it?" He grunted and sat upright, shedding wires in a slow-motion avalanche, patting himself down for the precious little book kept in his left pocket.

He and his Selves have always kept a diary-separate log for the sake of the TARDIS. A maintenance log if you would. It marks all the repairs, the troubles, levels of difficulty in getting fair price for the value of the parts needed...

...the log also notes the strength of currency on various planets, systems and treaty-consortiums, the most reliable sources for alloys, and those pesky planets that punish barter by execution. It's good to know these little things—but he'd give a lot to know why his Fourth Self kept going back to the same three planets for logic programs.

At least he doesn't have to mess about with mercury anymore (thank you, Third Time 'Round's the Charm Dandy!).

His first self had been quite triumphant to steal a TARDIS, only to be less than thrilled to learn the repair log had been scrapped as junk. Years later, he would be even less joyful to learn the book's true fate: The presence of celebrity autographs in the pages from young mechanics later to grow up to create the greatest models in the Galaxy had made it a solvent asset. It was probably languishing in a museum somewhere, under security screens.

"Could always steal it," he muttered absently. "Then I'd have a matched set!" The thought appealed to him immensely. He chuckled to himself at the thought of stealing back something that was stolen from him before he could rightfully steal it. Circular logic will only make you dizzy, Peri had warned him. He flipped across the pages, looking for square wire notations.

"Hmn."

"Hmn."

"Hmnnnn."

* * *

The Doctor leaned, back against the lip of the console. He frowned his way through one chapter, then another. The danger of the book was it was so fascinating. He had always been excellent note-takers. His last self was a positive _poet_ with imaging technology, and some of that stuff about jettisoning would be useful for the rest of the TARDIS's natural existence. Why, if you wanted to be completely truthful, Five's work could have re-written the manual on the TARDIS. Pity that this model had been off the school's syllabus since Romana's day.

Four had mastered the art of acquiring technology for the TARDIS storerooms—he never could resist something shiny on sale.

Three, bless him, had spent more time working on the TARDIS than his predecessors, using his trapped time wisely so that when he was finally _free_ he could _fly_.

Six loved reading Three's notes. Underneath the frustration and occasional despair he could read a grim determination to overcome all his obstacles, even if his brain had been crippled of its most useful technology. Six could never read through Three's contributions without a shudder. To be absent from so much of his own intellect...

Three's work often reminded him of his First notes; One's body was aging to the point that even writing took time, and his mind might not be limited but his ability to write had been. It was a delicate balance to compare them. The one had a sharp mind crippled by his own hands, and the other with the opposite problem.

Oh, there it was.

First Lifetime: _"hopefully the last time I shall have to look for these ridiculous things."_ Penciled notation in the margin in Three's hand: [page number...4B.5]

Six dutifully paged to the number in question. _"If I ever get my hands around myself's tiny neck I will choke off what little oxygen supply he's getting with his ridiculous bowtie. I don't need reminding about that business with the neutron flow generator. Not all of us care to work with primitive materials." _In the margin: [90-*]

In Two's Hand:_ "What was I thinking with all that mercury? I'm sure I had a good reason for it, but it must have been lost in the lindos. Hazards to traveling companions aside, it's a shoddy fluid for sensors. Maybe my original self was too reverent of Rassilon to tamper with his design..."_

Six sighed. That was typical of Two's contributions: Something breaks down, usually in mid-flight, go to the nearest junk shop, stick it together with magnets or chewing gum, and move on to the next problem, which was bound to happen within a few days. Proving that luck favored fools, Two almost never had to deal with more than one thing going off at the same time.

As if to make up for this inability to settle down, Two had left the most copious notes about the parts of the TARDIS most likely to go offline. Six used those notes almost religiously; Two had spent far more time looking for things wrong than he actually did fixing them. Idiot. His Second self was a synonym for childish distraction, but it was maddening to be halfway through a delightfully precise and technical paragraph of temporal stabilizers, only to see he'd reached the end at the turn of the page.

_Someone probably showed him a balloon at about that time,_ Six thought unkindly. _Or a sock monkey._

Six blinked as the lights dimmed in automatic response to the solar cycle he ran for his humans. Twelve hours already. Where does Time go? And he was a bit tired. He ruefully noticed that more of the TARDIS was lying on the floor than not, and decided to wrap it up for the night. He sucked a fingertip burnt on a solder, and muttered to himself as he coiled up wires.

PLINK.

Six stopped, turned his gaze upwards, and sought inward strength. If he heard that sound never again, it would be too soon. He looked down.

No such luck.

Grumbling and mumbling dire imprecations, The Doctor toed a long-dead CIA sensor away from his precious wires, and took great pleasure in crushing it underfoot.

He'd found twenty five of the beastly little things in this one incarnation alone. There was no telling how many were left.

Three had been forced to tolerate their presence, but he had moved his console out of the TARDIS in the hopes of rigging a Time-table to escape Earth. It had accomplished nothing more than an exercise in futility and a frightening step into a parallel dimension.

(The Time Lords were still very cross about that one, especially the Temporal Grace Committee, who'd kept saying for millenia it was impossible).

Four had probably had the most fun, turning them on with his sonic screwdriver and popping them into radio-static pockets where the Time Lords were known to eavesdrop on other species. Six wondered how many of their audio-spies had burnt to a crisp on the data overload.

Five was a meeker sort, but he had valued his privacy as much as they ever did, so he had made a party of quietly, grimly hunting them down one by one and stripping their parts of anything useful, down to the last atom of magnetic dust and selling them back to Gallifrey under "salvaged parts" whenever he needed something for the TARDIS. During a Zanite Shortage (12 Roonders per .80 gram weight/Standard Gallifreyan Gravity) he'd made a killing on just the crystal lenses. Took the profits and set himself up a hydroponic celery farm next to the disaster Four had optimistically called a kitchen .

Six didn't feel like having fun or making profit out of the last lingering proofs of his violation at the hands of his own people. He crunched them like beetles, and breathed the dying puffs of their ozone like perfume.

This is my home, and you can't come in here, he expressed with every crunch.

"_**It's the TARDIS...it's my home."**_

True words. The TARDIS was his home, his pride and joy. Until Two had expressed it, the TARDIS had been a shelter and refuge from the Time Lords.

Two had been the first of them to regenerate inside the TARDIS. Such a thing hadn't happened in hundreds of years (and if there was an exception to the rule, that exception was kept under lock and key as a dirty little secret amongst Gallifrey). A Time Lord was expected to regenerate in the limpid privacy of his home, surrounded by weeping loved ones as they bade his personality goodbye (or kick it out the door to use Three's snippy commentary). Time Lords hadn't actually crossed over the bridge between one life and the next outside of home since the days of Free Exploration. Two's bond with the TARDIS had doubled from One's perceptions. Each successive regeneration had been stronger and stronger. Six knew he'd never been better when it came to understanding the TARDIS.

There were not a few repairs on the TARDIS that dated from Two's era, but many of them were with glittering, new parts and supplements—some had barely been a hundred years old when they were installed. The Time Lords had grudgingly permitted Two the use of his stolen TARDIS but they must have begrudged every single rajanalaktith overhaul while he was their CIA agent. He didn't like their additions. They were always standard, dull, uncreative...and the threat of sensors was everywhere. Maybe Two hadn't been allowed to fix the TARDIS while he was working on his sentence? It was possible...

Six frowned as he swept the broken sensor into the dustbin. Something about this whole scenario was starting to smell like three-day gumblejack.

The Doctor finished cleaning and found an apple in his pocket. Mel was most insistent on a fruititarian lifestyle. He perched on the console and chewed. His face was pleasantly designed, but it was now clouded with a dawning frown of suspicion.

The CIA had given Two a Statttenheim Remote Device...but they hadn't completely repaired the TARDIS.

What repairs the TARDIS had suffered in the hands of those fools had been generic and soulless.

Two had been the CIA's whipping boy. He had always been put on missions of horrid expediency that nevertheless would cause no ripples if he was killed. Six suspected a few parties in the CIA had been _trying_ to kill Two.

Well, he did have that affect on people...but still...

But they'd given him an SRD? Something as priceless as an SRD to the agent they were determined to use up?

Being around Two must have lowered his intelligence. Why hadn't he seen the incongruity before?

Something was off here...

Apple clenched in his teeth, Six scanned through all of Two's maintenance logs, and found the answer he was looking for.

* * *

Two didn't dare repair the poor girl.

While he was free, he had to hide in plain sight, scrambling for parts in time zones and areas of unbelievably primitive conditions. Even going to one of the so-called Neutral Planets for scrap metal could have accidentally alerted his position. Gallifreyans weren't wandersome by nature, but they were fond of their little field trips...and students were swore-bound to repeat any suspicious activities or events witnessed while they were on those trips.

Later during his incarceration and stay of sentence as a CIA Agent, Two had struggled with repairing the TARDIS on his own terms. Six grimaced, knowing the self-important and proportionally tiny minds that ran the mechanical docks on Gallifrey. They were all repressed philosophers when you came down to it—using sonnets all the way to the Great War to justify the color of the Chameleon Circuit Switch!

Like the 500-year diary, the Maintenance log was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. The Doctor flipped through a packet of invoices watermarked CIA, GC, and almost fifty cover aliases for the CIA.

Each part he requested, each tool he borrowed would have been on record. Each time they worked on her, they were strengthening their control over her. It was plain as the second dimension. Two had left all those notes about the TARDIS for his future selves, not for himself.

"Cheek." Six muttered around the last of his supper, but it was hard to chew around a smirk. "Thought you were being clever, weren't you? Well you're not as clever as I am!" He amused himself with a neatly written example of histrionics Two had saved as a souvenir after some horrible business with the Trated. 'Decontamination for brain-parasites'? _Oh, ho, that's too hysterical. I probably walked out of the TARDIS with some off-world hanger-on trying to squirm out of his pocket and scared the Dock Supervisor into his next regeneration. Pity I can't remember that..._

* * *

_*** ...check Time Vector Generator. Mercury levels need changing...Change battery power at least once a year if you plan on using it for hand-to-hand combat...**_

_*** ...HADS circuit...don't EVER use that! Very bad! **_(underlined six times) and little fiddly stars and squiggles surrounded the letters in blackest of ink.

_*** Invisibility factor...not advised in cold weather. Watch out for wandering livestock.**_

_*** Beware buying mercury on Vulcan. Occasional phials impregnated with Dalekenium thanks to that addled Dalek capsule landing in the biggest draining pool on that latitude. After a few hundred years in that stuff, molecular makeup a little queer.**_

_*** Cybermen power cables: As elegant as their sense of humor.**_

_*** Cybermats: In a pinch, you can use mid-era Cybermats as makeshift sensory receivers if you take out the frontal chip set between their ugly bulging eyeballs and connect them through the aft vent. Make sure you pull all the teeth out first before you plug them into your TARDIS. Some people never learn. How that Meddling Monk managed to get through the Dark Ages I'll never riddle.**_

_*** Salt water: TARDIS doesn't like it. At all.**_

_*** TARDIS temptations: Managed to activate that circuit today...I can't believe Old Urikbander said TARDISes were incapable of developing thought, but he always was a disgrace to the collegiate's tenure policies. Put a scare into the poor dear when we got too close to a Cyberman-infected rocket. Too bad she just can't tell me what's wrong, but then again it probably wouldn't stop me from landing...**_

* * *

He still couldn't believe he was related to Two in any way. How had he survived? Gracious sakes alive. "'You're almost as clever as I am,'" Two had said. Sheer cheek! Who had fixed the Chameleon Circuit? No one else!

Six huffed to himself, breathed out his nose, and paced around a bit. His limited contact with his past self had been nothing but aggravation and annoyance from stop to start.

That dratted SRD...how had he gotten that thing?

"Privileges...?" He muttered because suddenly that word seemed to mean something new.

"Privileges..."

_Some of us have earned these little privileges. _

Hmn. Hmn.

Six rapped his long fingers against his yellow pants, absently marking the stripes as though they were harp strings.

Fixing the TARDIS had grown more and more important to him since his regeneration. He liked fixing things, and wasn't above a little reverse-engineering once in a while to keep things lively. He still had the complete set of TARDIS tools from each incarnation, and his collection only grew prouder and prouder with each successive life.

But of course it's always the one that gets away...

_A Stattenheim remote control? Where did you get that? I've always wanted one of those. _

_Some of us have earned these little privileges. _

Privileges?" He muttered, tapping his chin. "Hmn. Hmn..."

* * *

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, the Doctor wandered out of the Console Room to the little repair-shop he kept in a side-dimension. It was re-scripted from the wall-planes, and its round shape worked beautifully as a mix of contemplation and problem-solving.

Here was his last collection of tools—his fifth self had been gloriously methodical in his metal artistry even if he was the most indecisive of all himselves. Six smiled to tap the lid open. Scanners, adjusters, adaptors, circuit-blenders and software couplings looked back at him, each piece lined up and shining. No surgeon kept a neater box. It was a thing of beauty. One could hardly expect less of Five, who of all of them had been the only one since the First to keep a clean bedroom.

Except for that cricket ball in there...Six blushed at himself and hastily pulled it out of a corner of geometric standard weights, and wound up stuffing it in his pocket when he didn't know where to put it.

And there was his Fourth tool-box. That was a BIG one—not unlike Four himself. Four's box was the most useful when he was needing "that bit of something extra" for a job. It was a giant rectangle of incongruity; so many different polygons shouldn't be able to fit in that limited space! And not really in a semblance of order, either except the biggest bits tended to pile in the middle while the little bits clustered on the outsides.

Ah, now look at that. A _real_ thing of beauty. His Third collection.

Six tended to feel half his age whenever he gloated over his third tool-box. It was just so...so-so-so. His Third Self had been needlessly trapped on Earth, paying for Two's mistakes, and he'd had the time to create some utterly fantastic little beasts. Why, even he hadn't been able to find a use for all of them just yet! And that he'd made all these wonderful little toys with the primitive materials at hand...delightful!

Six picked up a thin shaping-tool, smiling smugly. Sarah Jane had asked if he could help her find a wooden clock for the Brigadier's birthday. Like all geniuses, Three was capable of the occasional mistake in communication. Finding nothing of the sort, he'd settled down and made his own wooden clock for the Brig, wooden from tip to top to toe, and it was probably still ticking woodenly away in his house-assuming the insects never found it.

"Let's see..now where was-"-THUMP "OW! OWW!"

The Doctor yelped out loud as his toe hit an all too-familiar and much-too-solid object.

"Rivers of Rassilon!" The Doctor swore, hopping on his uninjured foot as he clutched its wounded mate. "Time and Death!" He swore to the Gods. That was better. Nothing like a little creative blasphemy. "Death and Time!" He tried it again. Even better. "Whew!" Right, time to move on.

The Doctor gave the beaten old leather trunk an unfriendly look. One would think that one would remember all the other incidents of past injury his dignity had suffered with the bulky old thing. If he was less respectful of his own past, he would have put it in the first room for Emergency jettison at the next chance.

His First Self's love of old things had translated oddly into a love for what was old on Earth. Temporally speaking, anything old by Human terms was laughably spry and youthful to a Time Lord's. Maybe the juxtaposition appealed to him back then?

That trunk had been a large part of the old Console Room, storing all sorts of odd things. Sometimes he wondered if Two's regrettable fashion sense could be blamed on the fact that the trunk had been the first thing he played with upon his regeneration.

The Doctor's pale eyes sparked as that half-pursued thought flickered into full flame.

Trunk? Box?

He looked back and forth, frowning. There it was, hiding in plain sight.

Two didn't have a toolbox.

He couldn't remember ever seeing it...

The Doctor wondered how he could have possibly missed that for as long as he had. It was plain as a Thermodynamic Law!

Six realized his face had gone slack from astonishment. He drew it back up to its customary lines of intense concentration, and sat on the trunk, chin jammed into his fist in a show of thought.

_All right. Look at the logical. Perhaps Two didn't have a toolbox. It was possible. One's first regneration and all..._

One's Second life around was quite often disastrous; it wasn't as polished or skilled the first time. Twos tended to be lump accumulations of past regrets or unfinished business. They were guaranteed to be the slice of fruitcake at the family bakery.

His first self had craved Astrophysicist Assembly as a young man, and that dream had been squished at every opportunity because his _love_ for the art could be seen as dangerous and irrational—plus it depended on a degree of exploration and getting off Gallifrey and the combination was deemed too toxic.

So when he said good-bye to his first body, no one was surprised when his second body popped out fully charged-up and ready to actually _do_ something about all his dusty degrees in Biotic, Abiotic, and Temporal Engineering.

**Fact**: Two had taken his old notes from school and built the first sonic screwdriver (must try to patent that someday).

**Fact**: Two had built a portable solar Killing Machine against Ice Warriors with the unspeakably inelegant Terran materials on hand—and the even cruder tools (UNIT in the 1970's wasn't as clunky).1

**Fact**: Sane species reacted to Cybermen with insane panic. Countless worlds had been shoveled over simply by the stampeding populations' own damage upon themselves trying to get away from the dreaded mental control waves. While entire planetary economies rose and fell on the desperate attempts to pay overpaid weapons techs to create the latest Cyber-Doomsday weapon that wouldn't also destroy all life on the planet being attacked, the Second Doctor grouched his way into four successful Cyber-counter-attacks by demonstrating how you, too, could repel Cyber-brain-waves with a piece of metal taped to the back of your neck. Weapons designers were angry, but that was to hide their sting of being upstaged by a little man who couldn't co-exist peacefully with a comb and a good tailor.

Two had jump-rigged so many Augmented weapons and databases that the Cybermen _still_ had his obsolete image smiling in their memory banks under HE KNOWS OUR WAYS. As far as those mechanical menaces cared, Two's model was first in line for cremation and a discreet burial in an unmarked nova.

**Fact**: All regenerations were vulnerable and dangerous for Time Lords. It was universally a period known among Time Lords for being confused, disoriented, unsteadily wibbly-wobbly, socially and sartorially challenged, amnesiac, and a threat to themselves and others. Six knew that dangerous time better than anyone. One's first regeneration was generally considered the most vulnerable of all, for there was no previous experience to understand the sensation of consciously feeling one's own brain re-wiring itself into new paths.

So what had Two done in the first three days of his new life?

Two had witnessed a murder, stolen false ID, gotten mugged, impersonated a dead official, hacked a lab, put an innocent man behind bars for his own protection, fostered a rebellion, got himself incarcerated, engineered a Dalek Disruptor with a vandalized relay box and a metal mattress frame, picked a sonic lock with a glass of water, undermined a Dalek uprising, cremated the Daleks before they could completely flatten the Colony (co-incidentally blowing the Colony's power for the next couple of months), and last but not least, developed his permanent and unhealthy fixation on the recorder.2 Which he had, in a moment of boredom, turned into a long-distance telescope and ersatz blowpipe. Himselves gnashed their teeth, but there wasn't much they could do about that stupid recorder—it had belonged to One after all. At least Three had managed to nobly sacrifice it to Omega.

**Fact**: Two had broken out of a cell carved out of solid rock in the heart of an argonite asteroid with a tuning fork. He broke out of the cell after that one with a candle and a bag of marbles.3

Two was _good_. Perhaps a little too good. Six still had to quell the rumors that the little hobo had rigged up a Cyberman's Death Ray with a handful of wires, a magnifying glass, and a lacquered breadstick. He knew how he _could_ have done it, but he hadn't. He would remember doing something that impressive.

Two was the first of himselves to jump into Better Living Through Mechanical Problem-Solving. Six had to admit he had set the standard for the lives to follow. The TARDIS had been far harder to fix back in those days, with her emergent personality in a borderline state ready to go to the better or the worse. In those days one didn't know if they were going to land on water or land; sideways on a hill or under a lavaslide. Six remembered in the 4,000 colors available to the Gallifreyan eye tense moments when the HADS had activated, or anxious times completely separated from the TARDIS, or being forced to choose between a lava flow and jumping into an unknown dimension... Oh, the massive overloads of fluid valves. Two had probably inhaled more mercury vapour than any other Time Lord to travel in a TARDIS. Thank the mercies Three had finally devised that mercury-alcohol adaptor.

All the cleverness aside...where were the tools?

"Confound it all!" The Doctor snapped, slapping his thigh in annoyance. He'd really like to hurry up and solve this so he could move to another, more useful problem. But his teeth had sunk deep into the question and there was nothing to do but see it through.

Two had probably hidden it in plain sight, like he did everything else.

Hiding in plain sight...

…?

…!

The Doctor took off running to Two's old bedroom.

* * *

Time Lords tended to leave alone the personal spaces of their previous selves. It helped ease their transitions when they were mentally troubled or their selves were confusing their brains. Six couldn't remember ever going into Two's old room.

Stale air tickled the Doctor's nose. He sneezed once and looked up to see if the vents were still working. The room was clean and bright, untouched since Two had walked away.

The Doctor stood for a moment in a room of his own half-familiar past. He had expected the pained memories, so he buried them before they started.

Old-fashioned desk. Drawer. A bed and chest for books...no, no, no...

And then there was the wardrobe...

The Doctor tentatively moved on some half-recalled instinct. The old doors of the wardrobe creaked with a shrill C-note, and the smell of his second self: honey, old books, and the wild coastal lands on Earth.

_I always loved those places,_ The Doctor remembered, and scowled, eyes flashing over the confines. _Not here...where would it be?_

_Of course._

He turned and hurried to the huge room where the collection of clothing was stored. Dresses, robes, gowns, tuxedos, trousers, slacks... item after item. Shoes, boots, slippers, sandals...no, no, no...

...shirts...lots of shirts. Lots and lots of shirts...oh, there was Five's jumper collection. _Goodness he didn't do anything halfway, did he?_

_Osnaburg linen...no...wool macintosh...no..._

Bits and pieces of the collection flew through the air.

_Coats_!

His coat from Gilbert and Sullivan—oh, very nice. The Doctor paused to take an appreciative sniff of metallic London smog and moved on. Velvet smoking jackets—and frilly shirts neatly attached. What in the world was that thing? It smelled like his fourth self, but the Doctor not only couldn't remember it, he couldn't imagine how it was worn. High Ceremonial Robes made more sense!

Oh, ho. There we were!

The Doctor congratulated himself on being observant. His second self really _did_ wear his first self's hand-me-downs! Clothes too large for his slight frame hung in the corner between an Edwardian cloak and one of Three's dust-coats.

_How in the world could I have ever gadded about the Universe looking like a boy dressing in his father's clothes?_

The Doctor grinned as his fingers caught on something heavy in the the pockets of the first coat.

* * *

An hour later, the Doctor had moved from grinning to a bemused expression that the Master would have recognized.

After finding the mousetrap, he'd been much more careful about his archaeology. Pocket after pocket had yielded some rather amazing things—some of which were actually identifiable, but why the mercury-swamp smelling coat would have half a doorknob in it was anyone's guess. A packet of drawer pins made as much sense as the sea-sponge and the sumi-e calligraphy set. The stethescope was dated 1962, and a primitive electric calculator in the shape of a daft little humanoid professor was just bizarre.

The Doctor felt his hearts skip. He picked up the antique and turned it over in his hands. Of all the things that wouldn't make sense...The abacus in the other coat made more sense (Two had a fondness for anything shiny).

The Time Lord turned the heavy plastic casing over and thumbed the battery hatch. He dug out a well-corroded battery and fumbled with the case a bit longer before pulling out his own (improved) sonic screwdriver.

_He had to have his own tool-kit,_ the Doctor congratulated himself smugly._ He couldn't resist._

The screws went flying. He stuffed them hastily into his pocket and prized the shell open, _(found your contraband tools, you so-called clever little bufoon),_ expecting to see a row of delicate instruments.

He nearly dropped the Stattenheim Remote Device to the floor.

_Oh, my._

A momentary flush of techno-lust swamped his fevered brain but it was quickly cooled by the small paper tucked underneath. He scowled, imagining a smug comment or three in Two's handwriting, but the paper initially puzzled him. It looked perfectly blank.

Well, why a piece of paper underneath the Device? Hmn. Hmn.

The Doctor held the paper up in several different directions, sniffed it, and finally yanked a microscope out of a drawer. _There we are. Letters._

* * *

_**You'll probably need this, but if I were you I wouldn't tell anyone I had it. You know how THEY are about keeping all the nice things for themselves. **_

_**I told them the Androgums took it from me and that it was destroyed in the Time machine. They're stupid enough to believe that...mostly because they think I'm stupid. You really should try that some time. You're smart enough to be stupid once in a while, aren't you?**_

* * *

"Why that confounded cheek!" The Doctor exclaimed out loud. "That...that gall! That...!..."

In the end, words failed him. He gave up.

He put the SRD to his ear.

It caught the biofield of his skin and turned itself on. He heard it humming quietly against his jaw.

Oh, my...

He'd always wanted a Stattenheim Remote Device...

Now what to do with it?


	6. Seven: Infinity Number

This one is a sad, angsty piece. I never saw Seven as a joke, but an increasingly tragic Doctor, hardened and beaten by the sheer number of opponents that just kept coming at him.

* * *

Seven is the number of Inner Space.

Seven encompasses the step past the perfect number and becomes a spiritual set, a rectilinear concept.

Seven is the breakdown of the color spectra; the days of the week; the (original) seven planets; the Seven Wise Masters of Medieval Europe; the Seven Sages of China. Rome had Seven Emperors; there were Seven Kings of Greece. The Seven Against Thebes; the Seven Hills of Constantinople. The Seven Liberal Arts. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

In Ancient Egypt, Seven was a God Number. All decisions of the Pharaoh were made in divisions of 7 but the symbol for 7 was never depicted. That would be to blaspheme the infinite.

The Doctor's Inner Space is the vast corridors of his mind. It is a dark place. There are too many consequences of living so long and seeing so much. Small mistakes of the past multiply with each regeneration's hindsight. Let the other Time Lords view their lives in thousands of years or more; he's done more in his not-even-a-thousand-years than any of them had in their long lives. Time has compressed upon itself within the Doctor. He is his own Rock of Eternity.

His memories are developing geologic folds; slow-moving layers of perspective that belay the inhuman swiftness of his reflexes and his conclusions. The events that concerned Six are still moving forward. The monsters are still out there, but they aren't as relentlessly deadly as the Cybermen, or the Daleks. They are beasts of the starfields, hungry and waiting and subtle.

Innocence is a form of protection, which might be how his younger selves survived. There was a time in which he explored the Universe for its own wide-eyed sake; because he was in love with life itself.

That was Two's childishness for you. Time Lords had but two gods: Death and Time. Two threw them both under a tectonic plate and swore _his_ fealty to Life herself. A renegade through and through, and the one least forgiven. He admits he had a terrible lot of fun in those days, but there always comes a time when the fun must stop. The child must grow up and get off the ride, giving up their place at the carousel for the younger children. The Doctor has no desire whatsoever to be the child in the fables that dances until death or amputation of the feet that won't obey.

The Doctor is not an innocent and he never will be again. He has thrown the concept of violence out... but he has perfected the art of pressing karmic retribution upon those that cast it upon others. He leaves the personal consequence of that action to the future.

He's very careful about dealing with himself. There is eternal reverence for One of course, and a quirky bit of kindness for Four and to most respects, there's something to like and admire about himself in each time-line. But he lives in desperate times and obeys the need for desperate measures.

* * *

The Doctor settles into the library. It had taken long months to work with the TARDIS until the room was just right. Lights are indirect and warm, rows of books and furniture comfortable for relaxing in, and if he so chose, for a nap. More and more often sleep is forgotten. Meals, too. It is a sign of the times, he observes again and again in morbid humor.

His fifth self is screaming, rattling his chains and protesting the entire time he sets the controls to leave Gallifrey and head for Skaro.

He ignores Five. Five is an anachronism, a pacifist unreality. Of them all, he numbers Five and Two as equally dangerous to his survival.

Neurotic, indecisive, kindly and well-meaning but statistically deadly Five.

And Two, erased from memory thanks to a combination of memory-altering drugs and techniques from the Time Lords, but also (and here's the telling point), from the constant exposure to some of those Very Bad Things that the Doctor was hunting.

And like so many hard-headed idealists, Five _insisted_ on being the voice of his conscience. He never gave up, never shut up, and forced the Doctor to imprison this one-seventh portion of his identity into a safe spot where the protests to his actions would be kept to a blessed sub-space audial grade twitter.

He's glad he doesn't have to do the same to Two. That would be double the trouble because Two _really_ _did_ hold the Crown for being Impossible. Two really isn't there. He's a ghost, but like any ghost, has the power to emerge when one least expects or wants. Once or twice when he was meditating for solutions or just peace and quiet, the Doctor would find echoes of his Second Self: a snatch of music, a memory of something small and silky and colorful...sharp flint points of emotion—sorrow and loss or joy, euphoria, peace and comfort.

The Doctor was fairly (almost) positive that it was Two's re-surging personality that turned his wardrobe search into a fun game at the start of this new regeneration. He must have looked like a child playing dress-up. That was exactly how Two saw things. Annoying and exasperating, and yet oddly loveable, like a child who can't stop getting in trouble and one has to start laughing at their initiative. His Companions had _all_ to a T been affectionate and loyal and _loving_. No Doctor had said the same—before or since, and it was no wonder. The pain of separation was still sharp, five lifetimes later.

* * *

Each Time Lord has the ability to use or misuse the resources of their own mind as they so choose. A common use is the attitude that one's "past lives" (if one was to use the Terran Tibetan) are a database to be accessed. If these memories are not carefully controlled and organized like so many books on shelves, then the term "split personality" simply isn't a terrible enough phrase to describe it. If the dominant personality is not the one in the body, there is Quantum Chaos to pay.

In accessing his memories for further information, the Doctor meditates through twisting paths and forests choked with distraction-data. He finds traces of himselves like the twine in the labyrinth. For the most part his brain serves him well, but the older one gets, the more must one navigate through.

One is comfortable and settled in the epicenter, the First Personality, the First beginnings of wisdom. Three is, oddly enough, _all over_ the place, possibly making up for spending so many years trapped on Earth. Four was so tired when he regenerated to Five; Four is mostly quiet, a sleeping giant who has woken when the need spoke, did what he had to do, and peacefully settled back into his hard-earned slumber. Four is a Titan; one not to be bothered without cause.

Five was thankfully where he was: chained up so he could stop giving out his bad advice.

Two...

Two's traces tended to thread and loop about in time-streams closest to his own natural time-stream, but Two's close proximity to their Third Self was the most surprising. His memories as Three and Two had been rocky and dangerous. It was quite odd to think the Cosmic Hobo and the Secret Earth Agent would be getting along as closely as best friends in the Gallifreyan Afterlife that was memories inside the brain.

Once, the Doctor had been meditating on a problem that required digging deeper into his last self's memories; Two had been there, both of them surprising each other in a sort of "oops" moment. The Doctor never actually looked for Two. He didn't want to get involved with any other memories but the ones he was making right now. He was tired of distractions...tired, so tired of losing focus.

* * *

The TARDIS could be a lonely place, and it was even lonelier with Ace on Gallifrey. How long had she been his Companion? A long time for a Human. Maybe she was even having fun. Leela could be fun. With luck the two of them together wouldn't get into too much fun. Poor Andred...

The Doctor pretend-tapped spoons on his knee, and wished he felt better about what he'd done. When was the last time he'd had one single good night of sleep? Years. Actual years. When the Brigadier notices you're looking a little shabby, it's time to check yourself in to the Eye, or the nearest sanatorium that didn't consider DNA as a form of currency.

He, the Master Manipulator, was contemplating possible outcomes.

Ace should do well, he reminded himself. She was smart enough; she was clever and that accounted for a great deal. She was also, thanks to him, well adapted to Time Lord thought. The Academy should be pleased.

Years of hard work and sleepless hours had come to its natural fruition; a fresh new beginning was blooming for his young companion and he? He was settling to an ending. Skaro had witnessed much, and the Master's Trial would be only the latest of bloody chapters.

Ace had cried to be "stuck" on Gallifrey, her hard-shelled exterior leaking tears from a mixture of grief and fear. Even hosting at Leela and Andred's House barely smoothed her lost composure and this had distressed the Doctor; he had felt the two would be firm friends on sight. That had turned out to be true, but even friendship couldn't bear being left behind.

"_I should be with you, Professor!" _

"_Ace, you need to be there. This is a good thing!"_

"_But what about you?"_

"_What about me?"**  
**_

"_You need somebody to watch your back! You shouldn't do this by yourself!"_

"_Ace..."_

"_It's the Master! You need a backup, Prof!"_

"_He's in chains and surrounded by heavy firepower, and he is being kept too far away to take over anyone's mind." _The Doctor had repeated this speech in all possible variations since the news. They were repeating themselves, but Ace was Human, and she was too Human to let go of a cause she believed in.

"_I don't trust it. I'll never trust it, and I'll never trust him."_

"_Nor should you, Ace."_ She knew about trust. Trust came hard to the girl.

She was also more than a child. She was a grown child; the closest stage a Time Lord would recognize to adulthood until she made a Deed.

The Doctor felt Ace should be formally recognized as an adult for her experience and emotional growth. But Oh, Time Lords. They were impossibly perfect beings... Give them the proof first and wait for the verdict. Their smooth, benevolent dictatorial forums were the stuff of which gasping old legends were made.

Yes, yes, he knew that non-born Gallifreyans had the odds stacked against them from birth compared to the honored Elite that knew their family lines began with the very Universe Herself. But change was the only true constant and what of the Aces in the Galaxy if not the Universe? Those who rose above the challenge simply because it was their nature? Now that the schools were opening up and accepting other beings for the first time in...well, it had been a while... Why shouldn't Ace be one of the first to take advantage? She'd do far better than one of Dastari's people!

Did Ace really understand how well he knew her? He hoped not, for that would mean she possessed even less innocence than he'd calculated. She was still an angry young woman, a miniature mirror of her genetic imprint. For the past three thousand years, her ancestors floundered and flailed to re-write their own identities, shooting themselves in their figurative feet in misguided attempts to re-create their personal definitions. The price paid for this was racial Alzheimer's Disease; a degenerating amnesia that kept them from remembering their unique print upon the Universe. There were some vanguards of sanity in the psychic soup, thank goodness. But oh, what a pity that all those tiresome years of war and hunger had made them forget themselves. Humans were capable of great feats of energy, initiative, and soul. If only they saw themselves in a clearer light.

To the quantum mindset, seeing is more than believing. Seeing is _being_.

Seven has picked his way cautiously through the hazardous roads of reality on his way to the truth. Seven words in an old Scottish song summarize his world: _O see ye not that bonny road?_ He lives carefully, without the heady intuitive impulse of his previous selves. That is a luxury he has not earned.

Seven is the sum of 0 and 7. He must be himself.

The Doctor hums softly under his breath, unconsciously blending with the rise and fall of the TARDIS. He has the Console Room set on automatic: A cup of tea steams at his elbow and a book waits in his lap. His fingers itch for his spoons, and that has not happened in such a long time: his spoons were put away (it feels like years ago) along with his urge to play.

There was a time when he had been far more frivolous. Far more fun...foolish, even.

His memories are modeled differently from his other selves; for the first time he can glimpse into the eighth dimension. It gives him eerie prescience, even for a Timelord. He isn't sure he likes this questionable advantage; it added to the confusion of his regeneration and made him feel like a trained seal performing in front of a sardonic Rani.

But, if he'd begun as a trained seal he was now the ringleader of a very large circus.

Seven is the sum of 3 and 4.

He wonders sometimes how his sum stands in the arithmetic. Three was a man of daring-do, if too violent. Four was violent as well but he had his limits. He can recall these memories easily; like second nature and breathing. 3 and 4 never seem to be...very far away. They are close to him in odd little patterns.

Seven is the sum of 1 and 6.

His first and sixth memories are blended emotions. They had been united in their crankiness and impatience to those who did not obey their words. Seven _feels_ for their past sorrows, for he can see both sides at the same time. They were much more frustrated. One had been just exploring the Galaxies, his lifetime of academic learning only finally coming into use (And the idiot who said of it, "better late than never", had best say it without being heard).

Six' wonderful brashness was a form of courage unequaled in their lifes. Of all himselves, he wished he could talk to his recent one the most. He didn't regret being himself one iota, but passing from Six to Now had been horrid, his first experience with a head-wound regeneration: He'd simply gone to sleep in a protective coma, and woken up someone else.

The TARDIS hummed, slowly swelling up in crescendo as they skirted the parameters of a failed blue star. The Doctor leaned forward and closed his eyes, listening to the Temporal Tides whisper and rustle. He didn't often hear their travels. White Noise Blocks were set deep into the walls for a reason; he hated distractions.

In the old days the TARDIS had made a ginormous amount of noise. She'd wheezed and groaned and muttered and swayed like a rickety old rocker and his earliest Selves had kept it that way. They liked to diagnose with their ears. That was the Old Ways of thought that sowed the seeds of their personal rebellion with the Time Lords.

Time Lords simply _adored_ technology. They were worse than Terran teenagers with an unlimited bank account and a lifetime for shopping and no one to say no, you can't take it home. If they were to go down in history for anything, it would be their habit of not only re-inventing the wheel every few thousand years, but they also had the arrogance to try to smooth out the circle.

One and Two and Three and to some extent, Four, had shared an unease and dissatisfaction with computer technology. They were nervous about technology that could be removed or replaced as casually as a book on the shelf. They liked the primitive relays; the clunky old things. The Doctor appreciated the past as much as anyone, but he also liked computers and how they moved swiftly. They were designed to keep up with his mind and he appreciated that convenience.

Three had been the brilliant modifier of them all, but Two really was the one who fired up the Luddite in their timeline. The most advanced thing he ever did for his personal taste was replace his fob watch with an Earth Kinetic wristwatch. The private joke among the otherselves was he couldn't be bothered with a wind-up fob, so he picked a watch that wound up when he ran.

That watch was still around the TARDIS, showing up when the Doctor was cleaning something or poking about. It was a pretty little thing, sleeping until it was picked up and its tiny crystal heart beat like a 1000,000 rpm hummingbird in his palm. Sometimes the Doctor would pick it up and frown, caught by a ghostly little poke in his brain about..something.

Well, if a timepiece reflected its owner, Two couldn't have found a better match for his hyperactive lifestyle. There must have been a thyroid issue in his brain after regeneration. Too much lindos, perhaps. Those first-time regenerations could be a little...wibbly-wobbly in the timey-wimey scheme.

Five is within his psyche, chained tight, unable to move, unable to do more than protest. Seven mourns the necessity, but his fifth self wasn't really one of the "good" ones. He was too out of alignment with what was important. Six wasn't well liked, but Six had been more in tune with the real issues than Five.

Seven is a deep thinker, a philosopher. He is the sum of three and four: the Spiritual and the Mind. There are many long nights when it's just himself and the TARDIS where he wishes he could simply rest, but he cannot. His own mind will not let him.

He sees too much.

He is the first Doctor to glimpse past the other dimensions. He is a master manipulator, and he can talk people into doing whatever he wants. His psychic levels are healthy, very healthy, and his ability to observe has led him to peer inside the minds of his attackers and with a few words, twist them into his prey.

He has talked many, many enemies into their own destruction, but he has yet to bloody his hands.

History might argue he's gotten worse with time, but the Doctor never bothered to argue with History. He never asked it's permission or opinion.

He is the sum of One and Six.

Six was brash to a fault but he was right most of the time. Truth was far more important to Six than to be liked. Truth weighed heavier than the need to be respected and revered. Seven carries hints of Six in his clothing, his accessories. Six loved cats for their questions. Seven moved that one step further, and placed the question itself in the forefront with his lapels and his umbrella.

"You're not from Earth," Mel asked hesitantly. "Why do you sound like you're from the Earth?"

"Of course I sound like I'm from Earth. It's the TARDIS field."

"I don't mean that, Doctor." Mel cleared her throat. "You sound...Scottish."

"Do I?"

"Yes." She said firmly. "I'm afraid I don't know of any Scottish aliens other than Quark on Dangermouse."

"Quarks don't talk very well, Mel. They just ask. That's nonsense."

It was more than likely one of those hiccups that had been in the system since Two's regime.

Seven is the sum of 5 and 2

The Doctor is weary, so weary. He feels twice his years. Immortality has not the sting of Death in the grand scheme of things.

Five is inside his psyche, rattling his chains in protest. It's an old problem, and he ignores it. There is no time for the wasteful indecision of Five, his conscience ran rampant.

Not all things are chained up.

Some things are buried.

Sealed off.

Choked.

His fingers closed around a similar object, and he pulled it out. One of his spoons. The Doctor caught himself smiling at the toy, for it surprised him with the warmth of memories.

When had he stopped playing with his spoons? Not long after he gave up the gallivanting and tricks, games and vaudeville. It took so much energy to be the fool. He didn't mind if he was underestimated (the longer he lived, the harder it got to trick his enemies). But it could be exhausting.

"You're not 450 any more, my boy," he told himself sternly. "You're only _that_ young once!"

He is so tired.

But if Ace can make a future for herself at the Academy...it would all be worth it.

_All these years...all these long, long marks of Time. I thought I was free and I was never free. Control me then, at your own peril. The puppets have their own king._

The Doctor sat up, face exhausted and set, Lungbarrow eyes green and shining with rage.

"Who?" He whispered in the dim. "Who are you talking to?"But Two's memories were already fading.

The Doctor waited, hearts beating fast, for insight that never came.

At last, he sank back into his chair and closed his eyes. Too tired, he thought. Too much fighting in this lifetime. And for what? There were times when he, the Doctor who could read more paths of Time than any other...could not see the forest for the very trees.


	7. Eighth Man Bound

Eighth Man Bound.

Note: This one pulls pretty heavily on the canon of book and audio because there is so little of the Eighth Doctor on film. The poem Eighth Man Bound, is from the book LUNGBARROW, which is pretty amazing in many different ways.

* * *

_Eighth man bound_

_Make no sound_

_The shroud covers all_

_The Long and the Short_

_And the Old and the Loud_

_And the Young and the Dark_ _And the Tall-poem from LUNGBARROW  
_

* * *

The Axis turned. When the Doctor finally left the Horizon Libraries for the outside air it was to the petrichor of recent rain upon soft soil and sun-warmed stones. He sniffed happily, detecting chocolate and cacao inside the rich iron-oxide clays and sandstones. He had a long, aesthetic face, Byronic without being dark or oily. His charisma was bound in childlike wonder and life-love, not that poet's twisted needs for attention. Ahhhhh, The Colony Worlds. Just like Gallifrey: Better on the Outside than the Inside.

Here his Edwardian clothing blended perfectly with the natives. If anyone noticed him it was not from his hair, which was considered respectably long, or his height (average), but the presence of blue. His suit was dark blue, his shoes blue suede. His eyes were blue. It was a rare color upon this string of planets where one was far more likely to see green. They liked him; they knew him and waved as he passed them on the quiet streets.

He bought a stuffed bread roll from a passing vendor, and fished for his TARDIS key. The old girl was waiting patiently at the edge of the park, oblivious to the occasional citizen taking photographs or sketches of the only non-rock-or-tree item in miles (and blue). Still chewing, he one-handed the lock and stepped inside. The Console Room had undergone a new overhaul and he'd changed the desktop to a smoother theme; after a period of kicking and screaming over the necessity of changing his favorite room of the TARDIS he was now enjoying himself with his options.

Eight was the (generally) preferred base forcompunumerical programs like the one currently operating his TARDIS, so it seemed silly to hang on to the obsolete paths with its dependency on parts and bits and fiddlies one could get on almost any pre-digital planet. His initial reluctance to move to a more techno-progressive décor had been a carryover. The Bad Old Days meant the older Console room: Very early, primitive compared to the others, and very hard to control thanks to the utter imbalance of the Telepathic Circuits.

Eventually the TC's had been the reason why he gave up on the Room, even for spare parts. Pity.

As a fugitive, the TC's would have worked against him and pulled him straight to Gallifrey—either that or the Time Lords would have found and tracked his temporal stream through the TARDIS' wake if she'd been piloted in one of the adapted rooms. The brainy bits of the TARDIS had been supersaturated with psychic circuits capable of telling the Time Lords where (and when) he was. It had been simple good sense to format the timeship into a hard-to-track routine.

He still frowns on occasion, and worries about the day when his ability to understand the TARDIS fails. It has happened before and only a foolish man would say it would never happen again.

The Doctor wonders if the amnesia plaguing this life stems from more than the trauma of his death and reincarnation away from the TARDIS. Grace's surgery had been good in intentions but disastrous for himself physically and mentally. The Terran drugs had entered his body in a crucial moment when the lindos had been channeling straight to his brain, shutting down sections of memory for safe-keeping while it re-wired itself. It most likely wouldn't be fixed until he regenerated again, but he naturally didn't want to go through with that until he had no choice.

Taking away the surgical damage, it was the first time he'd regenerated so far away from his TARDIS. In all his life, this had never happened and he had no reference for study. He was beginning to suspect there were no references for him; he might just be unique in the Galaxy.

He needs explanations for his state of mind—even a shabby explanation will do. Mostly, he's accepted that he has recurring amnesia, but he still wants to know more. It's in his nature to ask questions and seek the answers come what may.

His current life is busy, busy, busy. He can't remember a more hectic period but at least he's tackling problems that aren't so very difficult compared to the pasts. The amnesic periods do more than worry him; his mind probably should have healed by now...and if he expected to accomplish his work he needed to solve this problem. Rumors of Daleks and Temporal experiments are gaining weight in the shadows of the Galaxy. No one's seen a Dalek skirmish in a few hundred years (or survived to report it), so they were hiding. It was a sad, sad fact that if anything was more frightening than news of the Daleks, it was the lack of news of the Daleks. The foreshadowing was bad enough; seeing the sheer number of people who chose not to believe in it made it all the more terrifying. The Doctor couldn't boast of his abilities to stop it, but he couldn't boast of anything until he figured out the cause of his periodic amnesia.

* * *

The Time Lord mutters to himself and pulled out the only scrap of paper worth taking back from hours of note-taking.

His list can be summarized as this:

1) A successful regeneration within a TARDIS was romanticised in the old epics, the odes and not a few sonnets. You could take your pick on the mood of the piece: tragic, stoic, zen...even an example of light humor or comedy if one was clever enough to pick up the subtle nuances.

2) The last example of a Time Lord's Regeneration inside a TARDIS had happened under sealed circumstances. After lots and lots and LOTS of poking about, the Doctor had finally ran up against the grimly final privacy-seal of the CIA.

(scribbled in the margin): _why does it always come down to those grajirixin CIAgents?_

3) During the Great Vampire Wars, there had been quite a few cases of Time Lords and Ladies bonding to their ships. The entire Era was legendary for sheer awe-inspiring, soul-numbing _bloodiness_ and it is quite plausible these conditions were vital to the bonding.

4) The semi-intelligent crystals that powered the brains of the bowships had been of a rare quartz that beat nearly 1,000,000,000,000 RPMS per second. If anything carried the seeds of sentient bonding, those crystals would be a good way to start. And since all forms of heat activate the crystals into vibrating even more...The constant life-and-death situations between Pilot and Ship had been legion and each battle had been both a battle and a bond forged in the fire of lasers and burning craft.

(Scribbled in the other margin): _All of my selves plagued with memory loss and loss of identity went through regeneration completely or partially outside the TARDIS. Even my Fifth Self needed extra help adjusting._

_My regeneration into Seven happened completely within the TARDIS._

_My fugue ended in a fraction of the time it had with Six and Five._

_Three and Four regenerated within a foot of the TARDIS' radius and adapted with minimal fuss after the 36-hour transitory period._

_My first regeneration was completely within the TARDIS from beginning to end, and is still the only time that has happened. It would be useful to remember more details but my amnesia extends to his regeneration in large amounts._

_Must piece together as much information from all the regenerations as possible. I must remember myself._

* * *

_** "...A successful regeneration between Time Lord and his Craft has not been accomplished in our recent history. The last known example occurred 60,000 years ago (Gallifreyan Standard Chronological Method).1 This is due to the fact that Gallifreyan minds have evolved past the level of the Gallifreyan technology that required a partnership..."**_

The Doctor's mild-mannered, pleasant face twisted to a very annoyed moue as he read the only valuable note gleaned from his last trip. It had taken him three months to get permission to view the libraries of the Twelfth Spiral, and half of that time had been loaded with repeated attempts by his well-meaning people to get him to "rejoin the fold," as it were, and come back to Gallifrey. Granted they were increasingly anxious with the proportionally increasing threat with the Daleks, but still...

He doubted their interest in his person would be any good. It rarely had before, and that was even without the appointment with the Schism at the tender age of eight years of life. Now he was on his eighth life and his mind had NOT changed.

Time Lords were the reason why he was estranged from his Gallifreyan relatives and completely cut off from his closest people. He just remembered Susan's beautiful face and ignored the Tribunal/Council/Consults most strident plea to make him conform to their desires for the good of Gallifrey.

Even in his Fifth, plagued by indecision from the foresight of too many options, had known better than to return. No. Not after the things they'd done. To rejoin their fold was to admit he had been wrong to run away.

No.

He'd spent a week with precious little sleep and gallons of British Tea in database after database, chasing down the most minute and infinitesimal data streams, but the facts... Well...rather, the facts we_ren't_ there.

There was no tangible proof that the Gallifreyan mind was still evolving (from his fragmented memories, he would believe anything else but that tired old story). Time Lords! They wanted to have it both ways, every time!

_One minute they're saying they are the height of evolution, and the next? The next minute they refer to some proof of recent evolution—such as this latest article._

Article of nonsense...He would find more sense in the per-Occupation-Era Laws of Multiple Marriages.

The Doctor grumbled under his breath and hoped like the devil he wasn't wasting any more of _his_ precious time. His long fingers smoothed out the crumpled library paper and placed it neatly inside his slowly-growing little book of facts, figures, and circumstantial evidence. He suspected the key to understanding the bond of Time Lord and Ship boiled down to the Great Vampire War. Here you had the _one_ point in history where bonding with craft was _not_ questioned. But why, posed the question, _why_ did the cases stop not ten minutes after Rassilon declared the war over and ended?

The Doctor considered what he knew of bowships. A bowship was a very dangerous craft to bond with. Bowships were massive instruments of cold efficiency and destruction. They had been decommissioned right after the War, saving a few historical pieces to both usher in a brighter future, and to remember the dark of the past...

?

The Doctor suddenly froze in his tracks, fingers hovering over the large book.

Decommissioned...?

One thought led to another. In a flurry of inspiration he dashed to the computer and punched in his questions, thick and fast. The TARDIS protested the haste of his queries, but he was on fire with the scent of answers.

THERE!

The Time Lords had been very good about erasing facts and figures from history (Rassilon better than the rest), but they hadn't thought to erase the dry, dull and pointless facts and figures that were the medical statistics of the Great Vampire War.

Oh, Cybermats!

Formendaatl, House of Oakdown (that was the Master's Newblood family). Pilot, Bowship THE SOUTH SUN. Committed for Mental Rehabilitation.

Takmenlern, Navigator, Bowship. House of Irisloom. THE MIDNIGHT STORM. Committed for Mental Rehabilitation.

Cattenremendersan, Helmsman, House of Whiteshore (before they changed to Brightshore?) Bowship. AURORA AT MIDSUMMER. Suicide.

Tricorrenssen, TARDIS Scout. House of Jade Dreamers. Type 40, FIRE OF JADE. Commited for self-induced Regeneration.

Natiramirana, TARDIS Scout. House of Redloom. Type 40, BURNING OPAL. Committed for Mental Rehabilitation.

Remorankanjantilant, TARDIS Scout. House of Blyledge. Type 40, WHITE OBSIDIAN. Committed for Mental Rehabilitation.

Jocrendel, TARDIS Scout. House of Hartshaven (Romana's people). TYPE 40, QUARTZ CUTTER. Committed for self-induced Regeneration.

Ch'efqu, TARDIS Scout. House of Redloom again. Type 40, YEAR OF HAIL. Committed for Mental Rehabilitation.

_Oh, dear, dear, dear...And the shroud covers all..._

The Doctor counted _twenty-five_ Bowship crewmen and over _twice that many_ TARDIS Scouts rendered permanently disabled AFTER the Great Vampire War's Decommissioning of the Warfleet.

Eighty-two Time Lords and Ladies. Broken in body, mind, and spirit.

_After decommissioning._

Eighty-two. That was almost a quarter of the Fleet when Rassilon first launched against the Great Vampires.

Gnawing his lip, the Doctor almost fearfully re-scanned the list of names with his eyes, and found three with the syllabic rune of Lungbarrow: Rendelandi, Navigator, YEAR OF HAIL; Orolmolon, Astrocartographer for the OTHERSTIDE LANTERN; Qilporunder, Battle Logician, NOCTURNAL RAINBOW. Two had been TARDIS scouts; one had been a Commanding Bowship. Three more were "relatives" from being by the House of Redloom. They had shared genetic material with Lungbarrow back in the early days of the Loom-building. Common legend blamed Redlooms for the nearly toxic levels of curiosity in the Doctor, as Redlooms were infamous for equal amounts of initiative AND curiosity. Put that in with Lungbarrows and you may as well give your hopes for a quiet family reunion a decent funeral.

Excited by his finds, the Doctor kept reading. He took notes. Three of his own ancestors had bonded to their craft, fought together, fought hard and long, saw their friends die in battle, buried their dead, and returned home dazed and bloodied and satisfied that the War was mostly over (save the missing King). Once retired from the war they were given honors, feasts, awards...and when their mechanical soul-selves were turned off...they went mad. One, it was implied, committed suicide in Otherstide fashion by throwing herself into the Genetic Loom. The Doctor shuddered at the thought. Had she returned, reborn into a Lungbarrow body? Was that lost Time Lady now one of his own estranged cousins?

And Orolmolon. An Astrocartographer? That was more than passing peculiar. He made a separate note of this and tucked it to the side. The old shreds of literature implied that the Captain or Pilot was always the living bondee to the ship, but that might just be romantic license. What if the rumors on the other side of the line were true? What if the _Timeships_ chose their mortal halves?

The Doctor blinked to see a tiny footnote in the bottom of one account referencing The Other. At one time he'd thought he'd picked all of history clean of references to Lungbarrow's favorite half-forgotten Founder. He himself was born on Otherstide—the equivalent of a Terran born on Halloween, Guy Fawkes, Belsnickle's _and_ Fool's Day. At once.

_-Otherstide Anniversary for the Fallen and the Fallen-after...How odd._

His hearts beat quickly. He knew he was close to something important. But what?

The Doctor put aside the information for the moment, sat in his favorite chair, and finished up his half-forgotten supper. His face was Byronic in a sweet way. It wasn't designed to look troubled. He absently ran his fingers through his long hair and tugged at the cravat about his throat.

_I've got to figure out this part of the mystery, _he reminded himself again_. I'm no closer to understanding my amnesia now than I have been...but forgotten information is always valuable... ...If I hadn't thought of looking through those old medical records...I'd be nowhere again!_

The Doctor's mouth hung open in the air, an inch from biting into the last bit of of bread.

Medical records...he'd been patting himself on the back for thinking of checking the historical medical records.

But what of his own medical records?

His first regeneration had been a fugitive. No first-hand accounts after the Great Escape unless he wanted to go dig up Polly and Ben! But he'd worked for the CIA in his next regeneration, correct? And the CIA recorded _everything_. They could make a computer weep with their insistence on detail!The Doctor's hearts hammered in his ribs. Stuffing the bread into his gullet, he dusted flour off his fingers and hurried to the memory banks.

He was not in the least bit surprised or shocked to learn there was no trace of a CIA report on him in the TARDIS. The closest he could find was Two's copious grumblings in the Mechanical log about "soulless, unimaginative and too-logical" parts and repairs (I hear you, Two!).

The 900-year diary wasn't much better. But the 900-year diary reminded him he hadn't seen his 500-year diary in _ages_. Simply ages. Where could it be? He poked about, tossing aside all sorts of dreck from his past(s) in his search. No such luck...

Come to think of it, he couldn't recall seeing it since his last incarnation. Hmn.

Reluctantly, he thought of putting that codicil of mystery aside with a brave shrug and a noble mental promise to follow-up when the time was ripe.

_When would that be?_ He wondered, suddenly frustrated as a child, and he blurted it out loud. "I just want to know now!"

****"_**Now? Time is relative, Jamie. If I knew when 'now' was, I might be able to hazard a guess."2******_

The Doctor staggered forward as though the TARDIS had spun into a hard solar wind and clutched the console with both hands, his head swimming.

That was his own voice in his head, vibrating across Time. His own voice back when he was Two.

The Doctor was as still as a Cyberman's Tomb for nearly a hundred heart-beats, dazed with the confusion of a Time Moment crossing his personal Time Stream.

He gulped hard and took a deep breath. He pulled air into his lungs and held it. The Moment was still there, floating in front of his mind. It teased him, a tangible fluttering of...

It couldn't be coincidence, could it? He had been trying to remember more about Two because of his strange regeneration.

No. No. That was a Memory-Lock. Time-sensitive. Somehow, someway, he had triggered a carefully boxed-up and locked in memory, hidden so deep in his own brain he probably didn't even know it was there until now. Two's words were both the padlock and the riddle to the key.

_If I knew when now was..._

The words were layered with meaning; Time Lord education crossed with Gallifreyan mysticism. The two blended all too well.

The Doctor sank into his chair, closing his eyes. His mind drew deep within, pulling out the sentence that had started it all.

****"_**Now? Time is relative, Jamie. If I knew when 'now' was, I might be able to hazard a guess."******_

Two...why did Two lock a memory against his own mind? What started it?

The Doctor slipped through the compartments of his mind, bit by bit. The TARDIS sensed something was up—or perhaps she just understood better than he what was happening. His hearts reached out, blending with the rise and fall of the Console's pillion. The pillion paused, slowing, rising up and then down in the pattern of a Time Lord in a trance. He followed the melody, allowed it to slide his body into a transcendental state of meditation.

Going backways...reversing through the lives...how long before he found the first part of the riddle? Fully expecting a retreat all the way back to his young and heedless 5th century, the Doctor was understandably startled to find himself in a memory of himself as Five instead.

Five. And his first three selves...Four was gone...Four was in terrible trouble...they had to solve the riddle to save their Fourth self...

A riddle in the shape of a rough brownstone obelisk.

Old High Gallifreyan.

Two: "_It's Old High Gallifreyan, the ancient language of the Time Lords. Not many people understand it these days."_

All: "_Fortunately I do."_

The Doctor skimmed through the memory, minutes of that time passing in bald fragments of nano-seconds. The pillar he remembered less. It took tweaking about here and there, dipping and skimming into the different viewpoints and perspectives of his previous selves. This was easier than he'd anticipated; the memory-lock was opening like the hull around a ripening nut.

His breath caught. His hearts stopped in shock before remembering to beat again.

He just took in the symbols in the top of the obelisk.

**_δ³Σx²_**

_Why is my name on Rassilon's obelisk?_

The Doctor's face was icy with sweat. Old High Gallifreyan was not a language for trifles. It was all but extinct even among the learned academics of Gallifrey. Partly because it was so very very old and Modern Gallifreyan had become more useful to the needs of the people.

But mostly because it was a language of REALITY.

It was the language that could summon gods and topple (or create) empires for it was a a purely mathematical tongue. If it could not be expressed in OHG, it could not _be_. A skilled linguist could therefore shape reality outside the people's Group Mind, if they could take "A" and prove it was "B".

It was an extinct language 800 years ago when he fled with Susan.

Another and unpalatable question surfaced: _Was that why Borusa chose my first five selves to solve the riddle of immortality? Did he believe that gave me an advantage in the Game? _Borusa may have used him for his own ends, but he made no pretense at the usefulness of using criminals. It was convenient to let a renegade dirty his hands for him, take the risks and bear the crime so those with pure motives and pure Gallifreyan roots could walk free. Credibility was on Borusa's side, not the Doctor's.

Right or wrong, the Doctor would never be forgiven for following his personal ethics, which were far higher than any ethics the Time Lords demanded. He would not, _could not_ conform if it meant the sacrifice of his own ability to choose.

_I'm not sure I understand any of this..._ The Doctor wrung his hands under the stress of his own thoughts. _ Is this the key? _Oh, Rassilon. There had to be a word in some language somewhere for the supreme irony of the most amnesic Doctor of them all, trying to remember the Doctor that was effectively written out of his own history!

"Daleks!" The Doctor swore out loud. It was the worst word that came to mind.

But what if it was that simple?

"Oh, that is ridiculous." The Doctor was still talking out loud, but thankfully the TARDIS was too polite to notice. "Seriously! It can NOT be that simple!"

Still no answer.

The Doctor sighed. He clenched his hands, slapped them from touching the console, stood, paced around said console a few times, muttered and puffed like a grampus (whatever a grampus was).

"(grumble, mumble) Just look at me as if I know what I'm doing..." He tugged the hem of his smoking-jacket down, straightened his white collar, adjusted his silk cravat, and ran his fingers through his brown locks.

And he typed his name in Old High Gallifreyan into the computer.

The TARDIS thought about it. The engines wheezed a little faster, and the pillion spun with a tremble in the axis...and then a low beep mellowed the air and a drawer popped out of the bottom of the console, nearly striking him in his left kneecap.

500 Year Diary. In Old High Gallifreyan; His first self's work.

The Doctor was oddly disappointed at the swiftness of the discovery. Natural problem solvers like himself never wanted to luck into a solution. They wanted to finish it fair and square. He picked up the heavy book, and started paging at random. There were little notes here and there in a different hand; he didn't recognize it, but guessed it was Two's, adding to his previous self's thoughts.

The book was full to the brim. His first two selves had been miniscule and stingy with the writing, and there was enough for a millennium in the papers.

? The Doctor's eyes expanded in their sockets. He bent and sniffed the book. He gave the cover a tentative taste.

The diary wasn't nearly as old as it seemed. It was less than 500 if it was a day. Why hide a copy and not the original?

Too many questions.

The questions remained where they were, simmering in the back of his mind as he sat up with the Diary. He moved through the pages halfway on instinct; the bridge between One and Two unsurprising. His original self had been ready to pass from one life to the next naturally, and had very few qualms about his odds for survival.

That was impressive. And brave. If anything were to go wrong in regeneration, it would be in the first time. But the TARDIS had helped. Two vindicated that. His entries had a completely different color to them: hesitant at first, his sentences short and chopped bare as if he didn't trust himself to write long ones with any accuracy. The further the pages went, the better Two got at expressing himself.

Paradoxically, the better he was at expressing himself, the trickier he got. The Old High Gallifreyan language switched from One's pedantic and professorial tone to something that might not be out of place in a court of law.

Daleks...Cybermen...(lots of those), yeti...gracious, there were a lot of marine beasties! The Doctor read swiftly, finding small clues on Two's bond with the TARDIS. The clues, if you pulled them out and threaded them together, became rather LARGE clues in the light of day.

The bond with the TARDIS had clearly been there with One. But things amped up a bit after his regeneration inside her dimensions. For the first time the TARDIS did more than fight the controls and manage to not take him where he wanted to go. She started protesting. She actively tried to get the Doctor to get away from the Wheel in Space where the Cybermen were lurking. And her misdirections revealed an alarming pattern.

Whenever Two tried to _specifically_ get somewhere/when, the TARDIS pitched fits. When he did what she wanted, which was to keep the randomizing program going, there was a minimum of fuss and muss. Returning Ben and Polly to their own timestream had been almost the only example of "smooth sailing" and Two's notes took a dark turn as he recorded this. Something about that one trip settled him wrong and The Doctor didn't understand what had his second self so very worried.

The Doctor scowled. The poor girl had been through the wars in those long years. The randomizing Navigation program had been the safest way for a fugitive to travel. If he had kept to the program and stayed under notice; if he had kept to the small, backwater planets with minimal technology and trade with other species, he could have conceivably stayed out of the Time Lords' attention for the rest of his natural lives. Too bad the War Lord had ruined that...

"Oh, what's this?" He said out loud. A string of words jumped before his eyes. CIA? And a mention of medical treatment? What if this was it! The Doctor eagerly leaned forward in his chair, eyes widening in the effort to sink the smallest details from the pages.

For the next fifty years, the entry forms were sporadic. They were uneven. The young Time Lord was keeping his diary on board the TARDIS, and he was not given many opportunities to linger in his craft. In the rare moments of privacy he carefully recorded the days between his last entry and the now. This meant his entries no longer had the freshness of the present. His recollections were integrated with the past and peppered with commentary and opinion.

The Doctor was fascinated. He had a feeling few of his other selves even knew about this lost history, and it was a relief to know something about himself that the others did not. Fifty years in the CIA? He'd had the impression it was much less than that!

He soon learned the frequency of the entries coincided with the frequency of medical treatments. After some mission that Two claimed to have "thankfully no memory of doing," (which, given the CIA's whispered reputation of drugging their own agents into senility was disturbing), a new medico had been appointed his supervisor. The Doctor was startled to recognize the name: Old Ttoth, commonly known as "The Surgeon," and a living legend on Gallifrey. Of all the people to forget, why did he have to forget being partnered with such a fascinating man?

The Surgeon had declared and enforced periodic sessions of "down time" in which Two and the TARDIS were together.

And the Surgeon had done something else. Something so powerful and important that Two had recorded it in as few words as possible:

"**Today they let me have Jamie and Zoe back."**

The Doctor swallowed around a throat that had suddenly swelled up. Tears long-forgotten made him blink.

"What happened?" He whispered. "What happened that they would let them come back?" His hands froze over the pages, and he slowly lowered the book to his lap. "And why," he asked out loud, "why did I bury this information from myself?"

At the bottom of that page there was a small, tiny note. It wasn't an answer. It wasn't a platitude.

It was a tiny penciled obelisk, with his name inside.

Another clue.

The Doctor felt his lips narrow to slits as his spine grew stiff with resolve.

Enough was enough. He might be powerless against much of his amnesic spells...but he was not helpless. It was time to get to the bottom of some long-standing problems.

He stuffed the Diary in his pocket and set the TARDIS for Gallifrey.

* * *

1Details sealed to protect the privacy of the Gallifreyan cited

2The Wheel in Space


	8. Eight, Squared

Eight, Squared

Characters: Second Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Most of the Doctors cameos, OMC, Goth.

* * *

_Doubtless you have noticed I have completely bypassed the Time Wars, Compassion, and The TARDIS 104. I did this for a good reason: I CAN'T DO IT JUSTICE. Rather than throw the hard work of other writers under the bus, I'm going to just write without that form of tie-in, and concentrate on other sorts of tie-ins._

_Warning. There is a lot of implied violence in here, plus a good bit of the real thing. Not that it would ever compare to a James Bond level of mayhem, but it is there, and much of it is psychological. Gallifreyans ARE NOT NICE._

* * *

Gallifrey, the world of shadows hung as a bronze ball in space. Her dusky mountains glimmered with the knives of ice, and, if one peered very closely, tiny silver threads of the rivers upon the Southern Mountain Range as they drained to the soft brown lakes rich in the life-giving plankton that nurtured the dry planet. Mount Lung was unchanged since childhood; if he looked through the magnifying screens he could see the reflecting spires of his school on the shadowed side.  
The Doctor paused, contemplating the planet with an outward calm that had no truth in the reality underneath. His relationship with his own race was nothing but tears and trials, but his planet? That was another matter. Leaving Gallifrey had been the hardest part of being an exile. Gallifrey was a beautiful thing, a rare planetary body that had been exposed to Temporal Streams for so long that her natural level of Gaiaic Intelligence had moved sideways into something unique.

Sometimes he wondered what she would say, if she was the sort of planet to talk. Would she scold her fractious children the Time Lords? They controlled their own climate, they blinkered the Time-phases so that no one could ever go back and change the world's history...they'd made 'clone' worlds to keep invaders away...but they had also created things like the Death Zone. What planet would like a thing like that?

He checked his readings, frowned at a wire in need of replacement, and caught up on the news on one of the more discrete channels. It wasn't easy to get straightforward facts and figures out of Gallifrey at any time; they liked being secretive even with themselves.

Hmph. No new news about the Daleks. Or any news at all. Still troubling. Some Temporal glitches here and there but there were no facts behind them, just speculations. Someone mentioned the Trated Collective's past history in Temporal bandying-about, but that person was swiftly cut down. The Trated were not a concern at all, had not been since they'd accidentally blown up their main colony in one of those aforementioned experiments (note to self, never set up housekeeping in a pocket dimension unless you _really_ know what you're doing, and don't be experimenting with angry, sentient beings at the same time). No one doubted that was the case. Really, it was a marvel that anyone survived Temporal jiggery-pokery.

Some fishing about the Gallifreyan Roster found The Chiurgeon Ttoth's current address. The Doctor was on the edge of thumbing the landing command when a banner popped over the Time Lord's name. It was a polite yet firm request for all visitors to limit their pleasure of his company to the hour of 8 and 18.

The Doctor stared at the little blurb, but there was no denying the facts before his eyes.

No visitors outside the hours of 8 and 19.

Ɵ Ʃ.

Thete Sigma.

Wellllll!

He tsked to himself, nervous. He checked his own time, examined himself for any flaws and hygiene issues, wondered if he should bring a gift, and chose to settle his nerves with some detective-grade reading. The hour would come soon enough.

He'd always liked poetry—he couldn't remember not liking it—but now he was on a hunt and that just made things more fun: Verses, songs, odes and prose in honor of time travel and the bond between Time Lord and Timeship.

He found a tiny fragment in an old book of pentasyllabic images:

**Ship has changed**

**And me as well**

**Will we return home?**

And in a style that translated as an Haiku to English:

**TARDIS humming low**

**Timing my double heartbeat**

**Triple melody.**

Some were subtle and intimate—almost erotic for what they did NOT say:

**My hands rest on the console**

**I have her permission.**

Not a few were moments of nostalgia braided into speculation:

**In Gallifrey the lamps are burning**

**The children setting tables**

**And elders fill the nooks with wise bodies.**

**The sight gives me comfort**

**But the Seas of Time are whispering**

**And I must meet the Tide.**

That last one was particularly haunting. It could have been written for him: How many times had he sat on the side of the mountain under the starlight and watched the city-dwellers settle in for the night? As they bustled, the skies above darkened and the stars lit tiny tapers. And he would lie on his back on the long red grasses, his head pillowed on his hands, and stare up at those glowing diamonds above. He'd come into Gallifrey itching to leave it.

The Doctor was itchy now. He was on the edge of a problem-solving brainstorm and he knew it. He could smell it. He turned page after page of the literature, and now that he knew what to look for, it amazed him that it was all out there, hiding in plain sight.

The only craft-bonded Astrocartographer, he learned, had been a survivor of three Timeship-wrecks in the wars and it was not until he boarded his latest one that he developed his bond. So. Whatever factors that went into a Shipbond, it was not something as straightforward or as simple as the ship's telepathic circuits meeting with the Alpha Time Lord in charge. The machines did not always bond with their "captains" but sought out an indefinable quality that he sensed and suspected...but could not as yet explain with words.

The Citadel was too large for the Doctor to be wholly familiar with it (walking from one side of Elizabethan London to the other and keeping one's feet free of filth at the same time was an easier goal), so he set the TARDIS for a polite distance from Ttoth's address: a public sand-fountain park where young people could walk together un-harassed in the complicated battle of wits known as betrothal negotiations. For obvious reasons, the Doctor had never been interested in that area. He still wasn't, really, but the privacy mores demanded that his TARDIS would be firmly ignored as long as it was there—just as he was expected to firmly ignore any faces he might recognize in the park.

Smiling hopefully, he took a quick step out of the TARDIS, locked it, and turned to take a deeper breath of a fantastic-smelling hedgebloom lining the park. For a blissful moment his lungs expanded at the rich bouquet of citrus, vanillins, and what-the-deuce-was-that-floral-note when his eyes followed his nose to the source of the smell...and he choked.

A tall stone wall loomed over his head, a dark berrystone blistered over, cracked and glazed with the proofs of an old fire that had ripped through the old city so fast and so hot it had melted the first layer of silica in the stone and cased it in a crackling glass the exact shade of the infamous dark jade Lungbarrow Eyes.

Oops. He'd forgotten this was part of the Old City's outer boundaries before Rassilon took control from the squabbling warlords. Not a nice era if one wanted to claim pride in Gallifreyan heritage. And yet the privacy and confidentiality of courting lovers at the Park was part of the Reconciliation that followed: In the stroke of a magnanimous Presidential pen, an area known for blood spilled over titles and property rights had become a safe zone separate and removed from politics but familial and governmental.

The Doctor sighed, resigned to the fact that his people could be amazingly silly things. He double-checked the TARDIS lock, and set his best feet forward. If the city had failed to improve the hoary old architecture in the past 20,000 years or so... He turned the corner and stopped dead in his tracks.

...aaaand there it was.

The Doctor grimaced at the sight of the first Rassilon's Chessman. Horrid thing. It was large, ponderous, and crafted in heavy lines to fool the brain into thinking the statue was clumsy and slow.

Uneasily fascinated by something as effective (and as pretty) as an Iron Maiden, the Doctor slowed and took in the Chessman. Its stone face twisted nastily to show filed teeth under a curled stone beard, and mineral tears wept from the top of its helm down to its heavy stone boots. Its four hands clenched different weapons of various designs of clever mayhem: axe, short-sword, spear, hammer.

The Doctor shivered to see something from their old bloody past in such a quiet place. The name of the original Chessmen's creator/owner was lost to history, but she had gone against Rassilon with them, and like so many, she had lost. Rassilon had taken the Chessmen and shaped them for his own uses, guarding the Courts of the Citadels with the programming prepared to pulp anyone who sought betrayal. Twenty of the Chessmen remained from the original stone army, the rest lost to history. One could only hope the rest would follow soon.

"Dreadful, aren't they?"

The Doctor jumped, actually jumped, and came down in the opposite direction to see a lean old man tapping up the pavement with a carved stick. His hair was snow-white and finely curled, and despite his age his skin glowed with the velvety rich chocolate of a Gallifreyan from the Whitewater Lands. House of Jade Dreams, the Time Lord guessed. They could be of astonishing physical variety, but their hair always turned snow-white after their third century.

The old man tapped right up to the Chessman and peered up into the disapproving stone face with a matching expression. "When I was working for the CIA, I had to walk past a gauntlet of these charming socialites on my way to the supervisor's office. And every time, I told myself every day to take comfort that I wouldn't see these brutes after I retired...and wouldn't you know? When I actually do retire (for real), my pension gives me a nice little bungalow next to this ugsome fellow. I have to see his pretty face every time I leave the house!

"There's a joke in that somewhere," he added, with a dark scowl into the stone eyes. "But there's no laughing in that face."

The Doctor cleared his throat. "I remember you!" he blurted.

The old gentleman smiled as benignly as old K'anpo Rinpoche. "So you do," he chuckled. "How do you do, Doctor. It's been a long time. Do you still like my choice of drink?"

"Er?"

"I have a new brewing-pot...quarters are much larger this time around." The Chiurgeon was already moving past him. "Well, come along, come along. I'm not about to stick around and wait for you to regenerate again!"

The Doctor hurried to keep up. "Excuse me!" He cleared his throat. "But this is a little sudden. I"m here to speak with you-"

"Oh, my word. You've lost some of your spontaneity, haven't you? Now that's a dashed pity." The old man tutted and shook his head from side to side, beautiful puffy white hair lifting in the breeze. "It's one of the things I adored about you in that stale old morgue of an Agency. Always gadding about, bouncing off the walls, speaking your mind, telling the truth when it was the last thing anyone wanted to hear...wearing blue socks to go with your red kerchief...stirring your tea with your soup spoon right in front of the Interrogator's Wife at her fancy parties... What a _bad_ boy you were!"

The Doctor stared as The Chiurgeon paused and giggled at many happy memories. Oh, well, if he wanted spontaneous... "I need help remembering my past." He cut to the chase.

"That's better." The Chiurgeon approved. "And not surprising. I've been waiting for you, Doctor."

"You knew I would come. That's why you set the visiting hours to pun with my school name?"

"You always keep your promises. If you need help remembering your past I'm not surprised it took you this long. I suspected as much."

"Wait...you knew I would be short on memory?"

"My boy, I _did_ work for the CIA...Detrivores, all of them. No, I malign true detrivores. The CIA kills its prey in order to devour its carrion It fell to my hands to examine the consequences of mental damage on the Agents they used...or used up, as it were." For the first time the pleasant old face darkened to something unpleasant. "I couldn't trust anyone else with that work. Young people rarely have ethics when they work in a place like that. They're planning to move up in the world." His long, knobby fingers smoothed the head of his cane. "I am a healer by profession and by calling, so I went where I was needed. I only worked with them in hopes of helping the few decent ones behind those horrid walls, and ensuring that Agents who needed retirement were retired, and not deliberately sent off on Mercy Missions."

Mercy Missions. Missions where a weak Gallifreyan would be put into a situation where survival was not expected. The Doctor shivered under the warmth of the suns.

"Was I one of those agents?"

"Oh, my. You have forgotten a bit. Or is this part of your layered personality?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Yes I do believe we should talk." The old Time Lord turned to a smoothly-rounded house. It and many other clones stretched down the quiet street, surrounded by clumps of shrubbery. The Doctor hadn't seen it in all the excitement with the Chessman. It was buried under thick vines of a large, delicately scalloped green and violet leaf. "Well, come along, my boy. We'll see if my young ones haven't stolen my last biscuits."

Slightly out of control of the situation, the Doctor followed. He was more than happy to leave the scowling Chessman behind, but the indoors was darker and he almost tripped over a stack of books in the middle of the floor.

"Mind the books." The Chiurgeon said as he waded through a knee-high forest of boxes, tins, and odd little bottles.

The Doctor looked down. The book that had (by the feel of things) bent his big toenail backwards on impact, was a mighty tome indeed: IN DEFENSE OF THE CHAMELEON ARCH. Heavens. The other books in the pile were no lighter: CLIMATE CONTROL OFF GALLIFREY; ADJUSTING FOR TEMPORAL TIME ZONES ON OTHER PLANETS; EXOTIC ACIDS. HOW TO EAT OFF-PLANET FOODS FOR MAXIMUM NUTRITION.

"Take the sofa. It's safer." His host advised.

The Doctor complied and looked around from his safety zone. Books were...everywhere. And tapes. And disks. And adaptors. And spools, film canisters...he could even see a micro-library perched in the corner. He hastily pulled his feet off the disastrous floor and under his legs as Ttoth tottered out with a steaming teapot and cups on a tray.

"Oh, before I forget...here you are, I've been keeping this for you." Ttoth rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a once-familiar object. A blue painted Recorder. "Here you are, wear it in good health—or however one says that. I'm a little out of practice with Tellurian customs."

The Doctor's face creased in bewilderment as he picked up the instrument. "I thought I'd lost this to Omega."

"You lost one of them, if I recall. You kept more than one around, and this was the one you played when you were over here." Goth stretched and winced at the effort. "He was always fiddling about with that little flute-thing. Hardly surprising. He told me once it was the only thing he had of your mother." Ttoth drank thirstily, and fished a berry out of the bottom of his cup with relish. "Probably _really_ why Goth hated you so much, when I think about it."

The Doctor's head was spinning. Data. Overload. "What do you mean? Goth?"

"Well, the rumors of you having a Human mother, you know. Most of the CIA is staffed with purists. I know the Lady President Romana opened the Time Lord Academy to Offworlders (about time, too), but back in those days, the CIA was worse than the Tribunal on any given day. Hmph! Of course we all know that's all they are. RUMOURS." Ttoth winked. "I'd heard of you of course. Our lines never crossed while you were a respectable citizen, but you know how people talk and I always promised myself that if you were ever dragged back here, I'd look you up. You're such a lovely anachronism, my boy."

"_Me?"_ The Doctor was indignant.

Ttoth roared. "Exactly what you said the first time I said that!"

"When we first met?"

"Oh, no. That came later after I saved your life. And, I daresay, what was left of your brain-cells. My word! What a...boondoggle, I think you called it?" Ttoth shuddered and drank again. "You came back from a hideous case...I'll spare you the details but you were more dead than alive and your TARDIS was no better. The technicians needed a week to clean the Temporal radiation off the hull itself, and parts of the memory banks were destroyed...of course that's not why they brought me in; my cousin was on the recovery case and she noticed they couldn't wake you out of your coma. Whatever did happen, it had tossed up your mental walls to the point that even the Medical Mind Probe couldn't get in or out of that box in your head. So she went past her authority and sent for me. I was just beginning to chafe at my retirement, and I'd had some experience with traumatized psychic defenses, so of course I was glad to do something..."

The Chiurgeon cleared his throat and looked awkward for the first time. "I confess, it took me a full second to believe what I was seeing on the screens."

"What did you see?"

"You know how the CIA works," Ttoth said, as if the Doctor actually did. "They brief you before a full panel before they do anything. There was a screen up with your medical data, and a screen up for the tech's data on the TARDIS right next to it. I saw both at the same time. They were explaining to me that no one could get past your psychic defenses to see if you had any brain-life in there. I decided I was either wrong or mad or right, and told them to clear the recovery crew out of the TARDIS asap. Once they did what I said, you started dropping your psychic wall...or rather, it was you or your TARDIS. In cases of extreme emergency, I doubt there's much difference."

The Doctor swallowed. "So. That's why they let me keep her. The bond was too close."

"They didn't have much choice. You know what sticklers they are. You stole her, and by all rights they _would_ have returned her to her fate as a decommissioned pile of shipwreck, but when it became clear that your life was bound into hers, there was no point in separating you because you were both useful tools. Kill one and kill both." Ttoth smirked. It was an utterly evil smirk. It stretched from one side of his face to the other. "I may have helped that along just a bit," he confessed slyly. "I wouldn't have said anything, but Goth was being so..._Goth_."

"What happened?"

"I asked, "What if the TARDIS stole _him_, and not the other way around?" Goth _hated_ being reminded of the past, you know."

"How could the TARDIS steal me?"

"Oh, dear. You really do have Swiss Cheese up there, don't you? Don't look at me like that, I'm using your own words. They fit, even though I had to look up what you were saying half the time. Swiss Cheese does fit. Well that's half the reason why they wanted to decommission all the old ships, my boy! If a TARDIS is too long without a proper pilot, _it goes looking for one._ And yours had been left idle." Ttoth drank comfortably. "Excellent taste, by the way. I'm told there were other finer, much better craft available but you picked the only one with Rassilon's programming in it. In effect, the CIA had an agent that could be separated from "his" TARDIS, but not forever, and you were useful enough to justify the adaptation."

"Ttoth..." The Doctor rubbed at his not-surprisingly-aching forehead. "I've been gleaning the records from Rassilon and onwards, and I haven't found any mention in any reference that says that's why they decommissioned the TARDISes."

"Did you think they would?" Ttoth blinked in mild surprise. "It's a socially awkward topic for the easily bruised, my boy. It falls in line somewhere with "Aliens my Mother Married," or "The Day the Power Surged when the Looms Were Designing My Little Brother, Which is Why He Are Triplets."

Either the Doctor was getting used to Ttoth's mental shenanigans, or he was fast growing desensitized. Ttoth referencing coarse Loom jokes from the Academy might have helped. "Would the memory wiping while I was in service under the CIA explain the memory loss I have of that time?"

Ttoth pursed his lips and looked sour. "Yes and no. The more regenerations one goes through, the more one's memories are...blended or compartmentalized. It's not a problem if your life's aspiration is to be the same desk clerk in the same office... _However_, it wasn't memory _wiping_, my boy. I made certain the Agency did that as little as possible to all of their Agents. What they did was create memory _blocks_."

"Blocks." The Doctor repeated, chilled.

"They installed a fine one at the beginning of your second regeneration until the absolution of your exile. CIA psychic blocks installed can be extended throughout several regenerations, but the primary one, that which detained your memory of space travel and Time...that was rescinded after that business with Omega. Long overdue, that. You saved all of Gallifrey that time...not that it was the first time." A surprisingly sweet smile passed Ttoth's face.

The Doctor looked down, uneasy at any threat of gratitude. "If they were so glad about it, why did they keep my Second Self under sentence? I was older in the Game of Rassilon, and older still when I met my Sixth Self!"

"Ah." Ttoth pursed his lips. "Now _that_ is where we threaten to enter the troubled waters." He tapped his cup with a trimmed nail. He was quiet a moment longer, thinking, before his dark eyes lifted. "I'm not exactly spilling state secrets here, my boy, but what I'm about to tell you is...sensitive."

"Who would I tell?" The Doctor asked reasonably.

"The CIA does not limit it's Agents' assignments to within their timestreams."

The Doctor felt himself pale. He put down his suddenly heavy teacup.

Ttoth nodded. "It is rare, but it does happen." The old man's voice intimated it would be a good time to change the subject.

The Doctor was glad to. He would have to think about this at length—in privacy. "Did...did we work together very much?"

"Well, not together, per se. You were in my medical charge." Ttoth chuckled heartily. "How that galled Goth. He thought he was in charge of everyone. What a vagrant."

"Goth?"

"Dear me, I wasn't talking about Borusa!" The Chiurgeon sniffed. "Now there was a constipated old caterpillar... for what he did to Magnus alone...well enough of that. Would you like more tea? Or something else?"

"I'm fine, thank you. This is excellent."

Ttoth served the second round and the two Time Lords followed proper manners just long enough to enjoy a few sips of hot, sweet drink without conversation before they were at it again.

"You really can't remember." Ttoth said flatly.

"No." The Doctor whispered.

Ttoth's face creased in pain. "I warned them." He muttered. "Fools. They'll be the downfall of our people, you mark my words. Between the CIA and the Council and the Archival Police...we're headed for disaster."

"Please, what can you tell me?"

Ttoth pursed his mouth. "I've been asked this question before, Thete. When I was younger I bowed to pressure and complied with answers. Believe me, f I tell you _everything_ you won't be able to remember on your own; my facts and figures will simply overlayer your mind and that creates inconsistencies. Would you prefer me to do that, or Contact with your mind, or would you prefer I give you key events and leave that crazy mind of yours determined to solve it all?"

"Tell it your way, please."

"That's my boy." Ttoth looked him up and down with approval. "I _like_ the new you. Miss the old you terribly, if you must know. It's just not right to see a perfectly good regeneration last no less than half a millenium. You, Doctor, are always unique...but I still hear your Second voice. He became my conscience. Even now, he's scolding me for being too serious..."

"Er, what?" Suddenly, the Doctor had a new and more urgent agenda. "Chiurgeon, could you share some of your memories of myself from that time? I don't remember much of those years at all. I don't think any of me did."

"Hardly surprising. They had all of you Agents drugged to the gills half the time." Was Ttoth's shocking retort. "Every time he came back from a mission, they wiped the "sensitive" details out of his memory." Ttoth sipped his cup with a bland expression at cross with his monstrous words. "It's standard procedure for the Agents unless they're very important—which usually means your relatives more than your skill in the field. Go off and do something you're supposed to do, come back, and all the "damaging" details are erased like so much chalk off a slate. All the former Agents have this problem to some extent. Heavens, there are so many of them with permanent memory loss—they can't do more than live through one day at a time, before they forget and have to live it over again!" Ttoth settled his cup on the tray and laced his fingers together. "There's another reason why they do that, you know. Not only does it leave a former Agent amnesiac and unable to remember any incriminating evidence of what they'd done in service for the planet...but that amnesia extends across the succeeding life-times.

"The Agent may not remember being an Agent, but only that memory is lacking. The skills, abilities, and the gifts that got them recruited in the first place are still there. If they can't remember their past, they can be...re-recruited all the swifter by CIA officers who know which buttons to push, which words to say, which persuasions will work."

"I _wondered_ why my Fourth Self kept...colliding into affairs on Gallifrey. It didn't seem to get much better in the life after that!" The Doctor scowled. "And my Third Self...it seemed as though they were oddly hesitant to contact me after I was freed from the exile!"

"Does it make you feel better or worse to know that you are far from the only Agent with this experience?"

"I have no idea." The Doctor confessed. "I don't like what happened to me...but I would never be glad that another being would be in this...pickle."

"He had a lot of enemies behind The Wall. Most of us did. I was lucky enough to outlive most of mine."

The Doctor shuddered. _The Wall._ The common name for the CIA's main office...and it had been on the other side of that ugly, pitted, scarred shield of red stone and burnt glass.

"Some wished to see him fail. Not a few of them were perfectly gifted men and women who secretly resented the fact that he'd done what they had wanted to do all their lives: Get off Gallifrey and see the Galaxy."

"So few of us are allowed to leave." The Doctor muttered. "It isn't right."

"No, it isn't. So there was that resentment...well...hmn. Which tense would you prefer I use when discussing your second self?"

"I don't mind either way. It's a past life, so past tense is fine."

"Very well. Goth—the same Goth who died trying to kill your Fourth Self in the Matrix—was Two's supervisor for the Agency. That's a rotten job. It's worse than being a prison warden. Too much patriotism. Makes them think they've got to run the show because no one else can do it better." Ttoth leaned back and propped his feet upon the small table. "He ran the oubliettes that the Important Prisoners were kept in, and monitored all of their activities, their temporal chipping, equipment issue—you name it. There were no less than twelve Officers of the Agency that had the flagship duties and Goth was the one who was in charge of all of them. The joke went that all offices led to Goth. It didn't matter who gave you your orders, or issued you your new uniform, or mailed you the latest reminder to get to the sickbay and renew your vaccinations. It was all Goth."

"Charming." The Doctor couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Goth had the somewhat optimistic plan to rehabilitate you into a _proper_ Time Lord."

The Doctor choked on his tea. Ttoth pounded him on the back and gave him a fresh cup.

"Oh. Oh, crackers."

"Rather what we all were thinking. There were days when the Dome resembled something out of Popular Fiction. The fights were the stuff of legends."

"That bad?" The Doctor asked weakly.

"I'll let you decide for yourself. First, he forbade the Doctor his civilian (re: Tellurian) clothing on the grounds that it lacked dignity."

"Er...?" The Doctor ventured. "Dignity? Me?"

"Ate the Presidential Cat1 with that one, Goth did. I don't know how many times the Doctor told him to his face that dignity and himself only demeaned each other when they were in the same sentence... honestly, it was all about control. Goth always had to be in control of every situation, no matter how large or small.

"Key to his campaign in rehabilitating your Second Self was the Gestalt. As you know, Time Lords tend to wither and stagnate when they are away from their own people. They can go mad from psychic loneliness. Very strong and isolated individuals are capable of living away from the group. Well, your first self—and Arkytior2, had to sever that mental tie with us in order to run away. It must have been dreadfully difficult for them both, but Arkytior was so damaged by that scandalous business with the Schism Rites, and I suppose the two of them helped each other stay sane for the first part of their exile.

"I do know that no one knows _how_ many Time-years they both traveled before they settled, but once they fell in with humans their mental states _improved_." Ttoth pillowed his snowy head against a cushion, just slightly smug. "Your grand-daughter is so far, the one and only Time Lady3 who has mastered the ability of going _completely invisible_ from the group mind. I think she figured out how to blend her mental patterns amongst humans. It's speculation, you know. But that's where my thoughts are headed and her genius-level school marks speaks for itself. Your first self was much older and more oriented in direct survival and the separation was much harder on him. If I recall your stories, it was much harder for him to bond. Were you still in mourning?"

"I..." The Doctor held his breath. "I remember something of that."

"I won't pry. It was a terrible moment in our history and Gallifrey should shoulder the blame equally for what happened to you and the child. At any rate, as much of a disaster you were as a Time Lord, Goth was that much more determined to "fix you" and rise you back up to the proper and high standards of being a real Gallifreyan. It would make him look all the better, don't you see? He detested you with every fibre of his considerable being, but you would have been a useful social ally and weapon in his rise to power. You had blood connections; you were clever and resourceful and you had very little fear."

"Oh, lovely." The Doctor winced, touching his forehead. "I just remembered something when you said that." He took a deep breath. "Tell me about my visits here?"

"They tag all prisoners on assignment with organic temporal markers. That made him less of a security hazard, but it allowed him a few more freedoms. Once in a while he was allowed to come over here for 'supervised visits.'" Ttoth's voice was thick with heavy emotions. "Of course that was back in the days when everyone was using the new road, so hours could go by and we wouldn't hear a bit of noise in the streets unless it was a holiday. Goth permitted it, because I was a much-older Time Lord with superior mental powers, and he knew my Gestalt was stronger. In normal circumstances, my superior Gestalt would be hammering away at yours, mentor to student, and eroding your defenses against the group Mind. What he didn't know was, you were teaching me how to tone down my level of Gestalt on these visits!"

The Doctor's brain was starting to feel a little bruised from all the pounding. "Why did you want to do that?"

"You never know when a talent like that will come in handy." The Chiurgeon said mysteriously.

"Well, I can't disagree with you." If he thought of all the cases in which that mental defense contributed to his survival, they'd both be in this room until the End Days.

The Chiurgeon leaned back, hands wrapped around his precious tea. "Which reminds me. You're welcome to spend the night. I still have the old guest room."

"I would be glad of it, thank you very much" The Doctor answered carefully. When one's elders offered, one didn't lightly refuse, and he was reluctant to call it a night and walk away from his first real source of information.

"Good!" Ttoth yawned. "Age is catching up with me tonight! What else can I tell you?"

"Well...was I...was I impossible?"

"Not if the 'you' to his 'I' had three half-awake neurons." Ttoth cocked a brow. "No. No, he was not impossible, but..he was just so _self-aware_ it caused problems."

The Doctor watched as an indefinable expression slipped over the Chirugeon's face. "I've lived a long time, you know," he said, picking his words with exquisite care. "I've seen a lot of different things and different people. But being self-aware is not something a Gallifreyan possesses in great quantity. Less so when the Gallifreyan becomes a Time Lord."

He smiled gently at the Doctor's expression. "Fascinating, really. I spoke with a few of the people who knew you before you left Gallifrey, and you had that quality within you. Everyone thought it was dangerous, but you were Gallifreyan enough to be respected and admired and you had an important job.

You were _very_ self-aware when you campaigned to ban the Miniscopes4; you followed your own ethics with the Hand of Omega. In the wisdom of my hindsight, I believe your natural self-possession was only sleeping in a protective shell until you left. You could be who you were without our stifling influence. You grew into what you were supposed to be, and when you regenerated, you made a final job of it."

"That's an interesting theory." The Doctor assured him.

"All the Incarnations that follow your Second...they are all in possession of that self-awareness. Such a rare thing among our people...a relic of the past taken off the shelf and walking around. All of the TARDIS-bonded had it. Every last one of them." Ttoth's face grew soft with nostalgia, and not a little longing. "And what did we do? _We destroyed them._ As I said before, you're such a delightful anachronism, my boy." The Chiurgeon sighed. "I saw your other Selves from a distance on your rare visits—well, summons—here. Even your Fifth self, so mild in appearance, was stronger than anyone else in the room. They never forgave him for that. Goth was, in a way, behaving naturally. It is very Gallifreyan to hate something rather than be forced to understand something they don't want to understand. Just look at all the mysticism and rituals we have to sublimate that urge and keep us part of the flock! But...over all...you knew yourself to the extent that you could not be lied to, and Goth resented that. Lies build and sustain the CIA." The Chiurgeon shrugged with one shoulder; the other hung stiff with age.

* * *

The Chiurgeon knew him. The proof of this was in the guest room: The ceiling was a glassed roof allowing every gram of starlight and the reflected burning disks of moon, satellite, and passing ship. It was perfect. The Time Lord gawked until his neck hurt, then he kicked off his shoes and stretched on his back in the middle of the bed for some enthusiastic star-gazing.

The talk with Ttoth had been enlightening. Too much so. He was still processing information and fitting its odd-shaped pieces where they needed to go in his mind. The Chiurgeon had not been lying to him. The Doctor was good at picking up falsehoods, but besides that, everything the old man had said felt right. It was unsettling to say the least, and after such a long hunt for the truth, his mind was finally relaxing, satisfied that it had reached a milestone in the search.

* * *

He slept, and slipped into a dream.

* * *

He was walking in a might-shrouded hallway, with starlight trickling through the high glass walls overlooking the Citadel. Chessmen lined the hall, snarling silently. They lacked the weathering of the outdoor chessman in front of Ttoth's humble house. These things were still bright and clean if battle-scarred, and their dead painted eyes glimmered by the ceremonial candles set in the wall.

_How interesting. When was the last time I had a dream?_ The Doctor was unsure, but he was almost positive this was a new experience. He turned, and saw himself, tall and wrapped in a striped scarf with a floppy hat perched over a head full of curls.

Snapping, brilliant Earthsky-blue eyes met his: Infected with wanderlust, boyish, bubbling with more energy than even his large body could contain. His old self was rarely subdued. His body could be quiet but never his blue eyes. They flickered and danced like the summer auroras. Mad Lungbarrow Eyes—he had the maddest eyes since Two, but unlike Two, couldn't hide his zeal.

And that large, wide mouth split the face below a fantastic nose with its grin, large teeth gleaming as brightly as his eyes. _Four could see him._

"_Well, hallo."_ Four beamed. _"Come to watch? Nice hair."_

The Doctor reached up to touch his shoulder-length locks on reflex. _"Are we dreaming?"_

"_I've no idea."_ Four shrugged merrily. _"I don't think so. Doesn't feel like a dream. More like a temporal hiccup. I wouldn't worry. What it is isn't so important, you know, but what's about to happen."_

"_Where are we?"_

"_Inside the Wall." _ The large, merry being before him dulled in brightness for a moment in the seriousness of the statement. _"Nasty place, eh? Not a bit of hope for the décor. There's biodata soot all over the place."_

The Doctor sighed. This was not a complete surprise. _"What are we waiting for?"_

"_That."_ Four shut his mouth and went transparent against the wall. The Doctor felt himself following suit. Temporal undertow? Or was it his damaged mind trying to solve a riddle with limited resources?

The door down the far end of the corridor opened; warm yellow light blurted into the soft, soothing darkness, and a small man was stepping through, shutting the door, bottling the harsh light on the other side of the wall. His head was down and his clothing was dark, but the Doctor would know the outline of that tussled-up mop of hair anywhere.

Or so he'd thought, he considered as his Second Self walked down the corridor, hands stuffed in his pockets. His head kept down, but his hair was faded to snow white and needed cutting. His black Tellurian coat hung limp and dead upon his age-shrunken skeleton.

The Doctor was confused and upset. He'd never been this old in that form. This memory was not possible. It was _not_ possible-

A large beringed hand pulled him deeper into the reality-shadows of the Dreamtime. The Doctor saw a frilly sleeve poking from a red velvet smoking jacket. He smelled of Earth: honey distilled from the nectar of a million English roses.

"_Careful. Time is Soft here."_ His Third Self cautioned telepathically, not speaking, and even his mind-voice was barely above a whisper.

It was enough to stop the little man dead in his tracks.

The Doctors held themselves still; the very night drew a breath in and held it. Time hesitated to continue.

Two remained where he was, one foot even frozen in the act of coming down upon the floor. His body was not moving. Slowly, he lifted his head. The controlled climate made a single bit of his unruly hair flop over one eyebrow, like a child's.

_I __am__ a child!_ The Doctor realized in the sting of sudden shock. His body tensed, for some reason wanting to step out of the shadow-reality into the open space of the corridor, but his Fifth self put a hand on his other shoulder, calming and soothing with empathetic touch.

_He is a child..! Oh, Daleks!_

Too many centuries had passed between this life and his own. He'd forgotten so much of himself, and he had certainly forgotten this! Inside a mature and adult body, the eyes were radiating an inner personality more suited to a nursery room or play-period than a resident in a secret government agency. When had he ever been so young?

They were all there, himselves past and future, hiding in the corridor with the Chessmen. The Doctor could sense their presence, each and every one. He couldn't see them all, but he could ken them. He knew they were there and they felt the same way about him.

But what was his Second self seeing and feeling?

The small man remained standing where he was, the eye of a very odd Temporal Storm. His white head lifted as if seeking a perfume, and outside starlight flickered over his worn face. His eyes were the _greenest_ of all the Doctors, and the Doctor was uncomfortably reminded of the superstitions and folklore behind that color when his gaze slipped his way...when the gaze moved on he didn't know if he was relieved or disappointed. Lungbarrow Eyes. The most Lungbarrow of all the eyes, of all the Doctors.

_Time is soft here,_ The Doctor remembered Three's warning. Was someone in the Wall experimenting beyond discretion? Did something here pull the echoes of their minds to this place, inadvertently using Two as an anchor? If that was the case they were all in danger.

And Two was still just standing there...

The small shoulders squared inside the old coat that had originally been One's. He'd never bothered to change much of his wardrobe after his regeneration—just the parts that couldn't fit his smaller body. Thinking. Always thinking. Even when he was at play, he was thinking. His mercurial mind simply couldn't stop for a moment. He was tilting his head to one side, thinking, carefully stroking each physical form in the corridor. It was just himself and the ten Chessmen, flanked side by side, a gauntlet of stone and he was in the juggernaut's position.

It was utterly quiet in the corridor of stone and glass and starlight and shadow. The Doctor couldn't even hear his own heartbeats; the silence was physical, too heavy for sound.

_I've dreamt this place... The Doctor_ remembered._ When I was the Bohemian. I'd dream of this very same corridor, the same scowling Chessmen. _

And the door behind Two opened again.

Two spun halfway on his heel, his slight body tensing from the shoulders down. His coat swirled about his waist.

The door shut behind a much-larger man dressed in Ceremonial Robes. His hands were tucked neatly within large sleeves.

Goth.

Four's memory of pain and pursuit in the Matrix rippled through them all. In the corner of his eye-mind, The Doctor saw his Sixth incarnation wince and shrink deeper into the wall. Seven leaned his entire weight upon his umbrella, sharp eyes dark and determined with a face as stone as the Chessmen.

Seven. One of the most dangerous Doctors to ever live. Of them all, he had the most in common with Two: Smallness, clowning to hide himself, capable and clever. He was all the shimmering cleverness and creative thinking that Two possessed...with much less of Two's childlike wonder and innocence. Seven was glaring at his old predator with a ferocity he'd never flattered at the Master.

It was like a nightmare given flesh. Echoes of memories went through them all, how this corridor had haunted them, plagued their sleeping minds only to melt like dew under the sun upon wakening. How many times have they viewed this scene?

_Oh, Rassilon, the pain!_ That was himself as Three. This quiet, terrible scene had made Three remember the forced regeneration, his broken mind and violated sense of self.

Goth was still approaching. Slowly, steadily. A proper Time Lord at a proper gait. He was much older than the small man in his path. An ancient man staring down a child.

"The House of Redloom awaits your answer, Doctor."

"Then they didn't like the one I gave them."

"You don't _have_ to be difficult all the time, Doctor." That last was said very gently, and in the softness of reality, the Doctor shivered in all of his incarnation. "It isn't very smart."

"I'm smart enough to be stupid."

"How very right you are."

The two regarded each other in the pregnant silence of the corridor. Goth's mind was a palpable lump of energy and power, amplified by the telepathic controlling coronet on his brow—his badge of office in the CIA. A policeman's truncheon to the prisoners who took his orders. His intelligent forces were strong and self-disciplined. Inside his skull lurked a dynamo, coiled to strike. A cobra far more real and bitter than the one branded into the flesh of Two and Three.

"Time moves on, you know. Your successor's Exile will be lifted according to schedule and that will be the end of this unpleasantness."

"I've worked for you too long to ever believe anything you say." Two's voice was soft and icy. "I saw the things you approved of. You only send me on these missions because it saves you the trouble of ending these threats yourself. I'm only freeing your time so you can concentrate on your rise to Office."

"The Path to the Presidency is filled with traps."

"You can learn a lot from traps." Two's voice grew as soft as the shadows.

"True power requires responsibility, my young Agent. And responsibility requires sacrifice."

"Oh." Two's mobile face smoothed into mocking triumph. "Is _that_ why you assigned the Lady Serenadellatrova to be my keeper? To let the risks of the work _safely_ assassinate your rival for the office?"5

The mind-lash that followed that question was not unexpected.

* * *

The Doctor gasped himself out of the soft reality. He was sitting upright on the bed, and his head was spinning from information overburden.

"_**I was the first, you know."**_

The first what?

The Doctor's eyes ached, his head swam from the after-effects of a mental foray into a temporal whatsit, and the echo of Two's voice—a parting shot? Added to his confusion. The first what? His nerves hummed. He slid off the bed, found his shoes and stood for a moment, blinking under the starlight. That...that had been awful! He'd wanted to remember but it had not occurred to him that a past incarnation would block his own memories from his future selves.

* * *

The Chiurgeon was downstairs, fixing up a tray of breakfast tea and pastries. His bright old eyes crinkled up to see him. "Good morning. I was just about to go up and see if you were hungry."

"Chirugeon..." The Doctor took a deep breath. "When you said I was allowed to stay with you on occasion...it was for medical reasons, wasn't it?" The old man's face snapped to an alert mode. "I was recovering from my assignments, wasn't I?"

"Among other things." The Chiurgeon agreed. "I refused to spend my scheduled free time and holidays inside that Wall. Their only recourse was to bring the mountain to Mohammed, as you liked to say."

"I remember." The Doctor let the old fellow press a cup of tea into his large hands. "Goth had...I all but accused him of murder. He was...angry at me."

"The CIA does much worse than murder." Ttoth told him flatly. "I'm sure they think their hands are clean, but engineering a person into a situation where they may or may not survive is the same for me." He passed a sweetcake to his guest. "Goth had a temper. Those under him saw the hard side of it."

"Did no one report him or try to do anything?"

"My dear fellow, Goth got _results_ for his work. He cleaned up all the messes that weren't supposed to exist, and he did it by using Gallifreyans that were...unsuitable...for proper society."

"I'm surprised you're alive at all."

"He wouldn't have dared arrange my death. I was his social equal and apolitical. My family was better than his. Also, he knew I could keep my mouth shut. If someone was the least bit useful, he kept them." Ttoth sniffed. "Nothing worse than a benevolent dictator."

The Doctor didn't argue. They both ate quickly. "I remembered a few things. I suppose our conversation spurred it." No sense in giving details. "I suppose I should see how the TARDIS is and make the most of my time before I leave."

"Sounds like a good plan." Ttoth approved. "But you'd best get on with it while the morning's still cool. Before long every idiot and their nanny will be on the street." Ttoth brushed his hands clean and tottered to the front door. "Which reminds me, I need to check my security system. It keeps wanting to go off!" The old man tapped the key open and pressed upon the door just as the Doctor, on his way to the door, tripped over MUSIC AS CURRENCY: THE GALLIFREYAN'S GUIDE TO TRAVELLING IN FOREIGN WORLDS. Something large whistled past his cheek and Ttoth groaned as it struck him.

The old Chiurgeon slumped backwards against his swinging door, sliding down with his eyes open and glassy, both hands clenched around the stone spear protruding from his livers. A streak of blood marked his slide to the earth.

The Chessman was awake.

The Doctor wasted a half-second in frozen horror before leaping for cover. The stone axe shattered the rest of the door, covering the old man with its pieces—and the Chessman was rolling forward, second weapon ready.

"Oh, no!"

The Doctor toed a low table on to its side, a barricade between himself and the Chessman as he flung himself to the floor and rolled (somehow missing quite a lot of books), but the Chessman was anticipating his movements before he finished them, and stone did not tire from its exertion. Its second hand lifted; a stone axe split the heavy molecules of the soft morning air and the Doctor rolled again, heard the stone burst from its own impact upon the fitted masonry wall above his head. Chips of mortar and rock spattered his hair and coat. He leaped to the fallen axe and struggled with its weight. A chip of the blade fell on his toe. The Chessman's third arm was lifting, this one holding the sword. Under the pieces of door Ttoth was, incredibly, moving. He was dying but if he couldn't get rid of that spear in his livers, he wouldn't be able to regenerate.

This was not a time for finesse. The Doctor was naturally fast and agile, and he danced around the floor, pulling the Chessman deeper into the room as it swung test strikes with its sword. The Doctor deflected the stone tip even though the partial impact vibrated every bone in his body and threatened to shake his teeth right out of his jaw. The Chessman adjusted its position and spun thirty degrees to face him.

The Doctor took a risk, jumped to the door, and with his free hand pulled the stone spear out of the Chiurgeon. There was a scream of agony which the Doctor empathized with, and then the Doctor was running to the side, pulling the Chessman to the opposite side of the room.

The Chessman stopped before Ttoth's low couch, temporarily blocked. The sword came down and it rolled through the split portions of the furniture. The Doctor was grudgingly impressed at the brute. His hands were burdened with the stone weapons that he couldn't really use—but if he remembered correctly the only weapon effective against a Chessman was another Chessman.

_If I knew who designed these things I'd go back in Time just to have words! _ The Doctor thought crossly. He swirled away from the downswing, and decided to just go on and deal with the mess.

He circled the Chessman once more, studying its reaction time. Then he stampeded around the room back to Ttoth, yanked the frail old body out of the doorway and spun on his heel, axe and spear latched deeply into the antique plastic frame in a crossed position. The Chessman rolled to the doorway but its own weapons were impervious to its attempts to break free. It backed up, rolled forward, and hit the cross again.

It would hammer its way out eventually, but the Doctor wasn't going to stick around to watch. He slung the Chiurgeon over his shoulder and ran like one of the Rani's bats to the TARDIS.

His last thought as he cleared the sand fountain, keyed open the TARDIS and dashed inside was: _I really should just stop coming to Gallifrey. I don't think we're really that good for each other._

* * *

1Gallifreyan facetious slang. The Rani created a lab rat that ate the President's Cat, so Ttoth is saying, "Beat the dead cat"

2Susan's name in Old High Gallifreyan. It translates to The Rose

3Which in the language means Time Lord/Lady. The gender is neutral.

4Ugh. One of the first DR WHO novels I read as a child because we had to wait for the PBS showing. Mind you the book was equally disturbing. The First Doctor glowed in the sidelines as a ferocious champion for the victims—those trapped inside Miniscopes. Pertwee's Doctor might fight with Troughton's tooth and nail, but they had far more similarities than they had differences. 30 years later, I'm still annoyed that some characters weren't killed/eaten! A great adventure, because it shows Pertwee's ability to show his happiness at new puzzles juxtaposed with his centuries-old experience that drives him to protect much younger beings, like Jo.

5I couldn't resist. Lady Serena was in WORLD GAME, and when you think about it, you've got two aspiring political minds, both brilliant and clever in this mix. Serena was ethical and clear-minded. Goth is greedy and ruthless, and he would very much be the sort of person to stack the deck in his favor.


	9. Casting out the Nines

_Casting Out the Nines: The Ninth Doctor.  
_

_A long-overdue cameo for the fantastic awesomeness of Peter Davidson...frankly, a fight scene I wish we could have seen in THE FIVE DOCTORS_

* * *

_Nine._

Time Lords share a lot of characteristics with cats.

The Doctor hasn't felt the _appropriateness_ of the similarities so much since he was on his sixth self. That was three lives ago. Eight lives down, and like the cat, is staring at the edge of true infinity.

The Master used to say the Doctor was not afraid of death. He still isn't. He isn't sure _why_ people are afraid of death...you're supposed to fight for life tooth and nail, and that is to say you aren't supposed to fight for just _your_ life: Life is important. All lives, not just yours. Together they assemble the ingredients of a Cosmic recipe. To not stand up for others is to ignore your own spark of Cosmos in the Doctor's personal Grand Scheme of Things—to betray the entire Pattern...but that doesn't mean one should be stupid about it. His lack of fear is something that others perceive as a flaw and he's fair-minded enough to explore this possibility. Sadly...When he tries to learn the motives behind the phobia he's only confused. Nothing lasts forever. Everything changes. Why don't Time Lords know this better than anyone? They should. They are the oldest race in the Universe.

Were the oldest race.

His first memory as his new self rested in the final hours after the war. There were yellow-rust glows and clouds over the sky he was crawling beneath. He remembered his knees had bleed through the fabric of his trousers and something terrible had happened to his left wrist...it was sodden and sticky and a foul stench arose from the center of the stain.

_I laughed in the face of the Nightmare Child, and I'm cringing at the sight of my own hand..._

_The TARDIS. Find her. FIND TARDIS._

_Can't change without her,_ that one thought hammered home. It was so important all others melted in its presence. _TARDIS. TARDIS. _ He gasped over a pile of rubble and scoil; a brick made glass by the heat of a thermonuclear-grade blast sliced his palm open to the thin webwork of bones. The Doctor screamed in the fragile air of the ruined world's matrix. His strength gave out and his body slumped forward, weak as a kitten's across the lump of jumbled up constructive formation.

In the darkness, he remembers something soft and fuzzy...a reality blurred and fogged by distance just as distance alters perspective...a warping that proves to your brain that you really are seeing something in the physical world.

_Matrix. Matrix illusion. All is illusion now. Matrix._

_Illusion._

_Not even a good one,_ he thinks with a ghoulish humor. _Second-rate, paltry..._ Brittle scoil breaks under the weight of his bleeding knees and he falls deeper into the artificial reality of the dying Matrix. Not for the first time, he wondered what deranged acolyte of the Mad God of had thought to enslave the Matrix of Gallifrey with the computer Matrixii in the Outpost Worlds in this mad bid to win an unwinable war.

_**I hate computers and refuse to be bullied by them!**_

The Doctor caught himself laughing at the memory of himself as Two. Silly little Two...the funny man with sad eyes...Yes, Two would applaud if he were here...would be saluting the death of the Matrixii.

_Madman's scheme, crazier than the Master...so much crazier than what the Master could think of...and the Master's dead too...He's dead and I'm dying..._

Something blew up behind the ruined hills.

_I'm dying and this could really be it this time..._

The Doctor crawled forward another few feet, ignoring the numbness setting inside his bones. The Matrix computers nearly won Gallifrey the war, but the cost would have been far, far too high for the Universe.

The Matrix whispered in his mind, trying to distract him, trying to pull him back to it. It did not want to die, and it was not about to die alone. It taunted him, tickling his broken mind with memories, hoping they would slow him down just enough that it could overwhelm him.

The Doctor had no desire to be the hapless Host of an intelligent computer, even if that was all that was left of Gallifrey. He kept going.

He coughed against the rising smoke and dust, and the Matrix gathered its final power, thrust a memory-arrow into the back of his mind: Susan's sobbing face on the other side of the TARDIS. The Doctor groaned aloud.

"_One day, we shall be back..."_ Oh, how his so-much-younger First Self had believed that! The Doctor could have wept for the pain of that innocence lost.

He answered the Matrix' memory-arrow with one of his own:

_"I am a Time Lord! I walk in Eternity!"_ There. If anything could hurt the Matrix, it would be Four's larger-than-life mind.

The Matrix quailed before that booming mind-voice, a Titan feared, and the Doctor crawled forward through a lake of mercury dust. The TARDIS was close...he knew it...

...Another memory-arrow shot into his mind. The Doctor nearly collapsed under its weight. The broken rubble smoothed to tarmac and pressed concrete; Gatwick Airport roared about him as he stood before Polly and Ben.

"_The thing is,"_ Polly said to him, _"this is our world..."_ (Yes, he understood that...)

"_You're lucky, I never got back to mine."_ Two's sad honesty as he parted ways with Ben and Polly.

Gallifrey was gone. No more longing for home. Tears burned his eyes like the acidic smoke and the pain ran down his cheeks. Perhaps he was wrong to want to live. After the things he'd done...

The memory BURNED. The Matrix had found his vulnerability. He'd lost loved ones before, but the pain had never gone away. They'd slept in his mind. Without knowing it, the Doctor swooned forward, his cheek smashing against a sharp-cornered foundation. Reality and digireality blurred together as a concussion wrestled inside his brain-pan.

**_Victoria...oh, Victoria, dear child.._**.

He'd promised to take care of her, a vow to the death for the father who'd given his life for his. And yet he couldn't protect her from his own nature. He'd kept her as safe as he could, but that wasn't safe enough. The Matrix' mind-arrow stabbed him again and again and again, replaying the pain of knowing she would leave and he'd gone against his own rules and stayed "one more night" on Earth so she would always know she had been resolute. Had he simply left when she asked to stay with the Harrises, she would have spent the rest of her life wondering if her friends had abandoned her again.

Jamie's face wrenched him just as harshly. This was being a father all over again-watching the pain of his children growing up and facing their own choices and being their own people. He finally had enough and went swimming in the night, leaving Jamie and Victoria to say the words they needed to say. Jamie had thought him mad for certain after they'd just dealt with the murderous seaweed in that same ocean, but it would have been less sane to stay around. He'd swam as far as the TARDIS and simply touched her with his wet hand on the corner. She tolerated his touch, understanding his own need to feel grief.

_**"I was fond of her too, you know, Jamie." ...**  
_

The Doctor might have lost the battle with the Matrix at that moment, but computers, even those that carry biodata of Time Lords and relate in soft sentient programs can make grievous errors of judgement. It sensed his loss and sought another to add to the poison.

It showed him Adric.

The Doctor _roared_, rising up on shredded knees, clenching his fingers into his palms as red-orange blood rained down to die on dust and rubble. _They always make that mistake_, he thought dizzily. There were things you didn't do. And not even the Master pressed him with Adric.

Even Seven wouldn't dare. Seven, who had chained Five into his mind and kept him a prisoner, hadn't tried to _provoke_ him-merely lock his freedom.

This wasn't provocation. This was war.

The Fifth Doctor flared in the firestorm of the Matrix, leaped out of his current span and screamed into the face of the Matrix' sucking maw. Hot, outraged and wounded, the Cricketeer had been pushed beyond all reason. Five, the number of the werewolf and the moon was full. The Matrix was seeing this too late.

The Cricketeer burst into the reality of the Matrix, his smooth face drawn tight about his skull-bones as he wielded a willowwood bat.

Five. Allegedly the weakest of all the Doctors. All because his compassion and empathy forced him to feel too deeply and see each issue from too many simultaneous facets. His regeneration had been double-flawed from physical trauma and psychic exhaustion; he had lacked the final cognitive recognition of Three and Four. His age and experience had been wise but crippled in its temporal filters.

Five, too pacifist for even the Venusian Aikido that Two had mastered and Three had practiced. Five had been the most indecisive of them, but he had _not_ been the weakest.

Five snarled into the face of the Matrix, trainers braced for support in the soft reality of the Matrix/Not Matrix, his eyes burning blue-green.

A Lungbarrow shade.

Five had never, ever, _ever_ lacked for courage. Of all the incarnations, only one matched him in bravery.

The Doctor rolled over on his back, sliding down from the support of a broken stone pillar as blood bubbled from his third lung down the corner of his mouth. Young, tender-hearted idealistic Five was standing over him in the Soft Time, cricket bat swinging to meet the next salvo of memory-arrows.

"_Salix alba var. caerulea_ displays a pyramidal shape upon natural growth which incorporates the strength and tension of the harvested wood." Five recited with a furious gleam to his face-too young to have eyes so old-and the bat slapped the Memory-arrow back to its point of origin, piercing the bank of foggy mental pollution.

The Doctor stared (it took less energy than saying anything), and clapped his hand over the region housing that leaking third lung.

"What most people don't know," Five added almost conversationally as the Matrix ground another round in preparation, "is that the best willow for a good scrum is female."

_I'll try to remember that,_ The Doctor vowed to note, assuming he survived this digital stupidity.

"I always thought it a bit historically amusing that the best female woods came from East Anglia and Essex-one of the last bits of England where the matriarchy survived. Just one of those little temporal jokes, I suppose."

CLUNK. Another mind-arrow growled through the air. Five easily slapped it out of the air but it dodged him halfway to impact and he only got the front tip; the bolt was flung sideways and clattered upon the smoking rubble of the mind-city.

Five's shoulders tensed. His supple body locked up like a thermal ratchet. "Oh, that is _not_ good," he said under his breath, gaze focused on something very unpleasant that the Doctor couldn't see. His gloved fingers latched tightly around the cane handle of his bat. _"Can someone give me a hand so I can hold them off long enough to let me get away?"_

_**"What did I tell you about the mindlash, lad?"**_

The Doctor couldn't have been more surprised to see Two stepping out of non-reality into the Soft Time of the Matrix.

It is quite one thing to accept you have amnesia. It is quite another to see a diaphanous memory suddenly gain flesh not a foot from the tip of your nose. The Doctor peered up at the smallest Doctor born besides Seven. In floppy, ill-fitting clothes he looked even smaller. His wild, messy hair caught the artronic winds of the digital atmosphere and danced about dark green eyes set inside the face of a thousand-year leprechaun. A child, but a changeling child; ancient soul trapped in an infant's body. A youth born with the secret of eternal age.

The other brave one.

The first Doctor to feel fear.

And the odd little self he used to be was standing face-off of Five, lips set in his disapproval as he poked his future self in the ribs with a stern forefinger.

_**"We've had this talk before, lad. Mindlash-you step back, I deal with it. Remember?"**_

"Something like that," Five said unconvincingly, and gripped his bat for the next round.

_**"Impertinence."**_

_"Comes with the dress sense." _ Three had formed flesh just behind Two and was stepping to the other side, the folds of his opera cloak making a protecting pair of wings. Three was far older than the Doctor remembered, and age lined his face almost as deeply as Two, but he was still tall and very strong.

_"And the manners."_ The First had the last word, as always. He leaned into his cane, his heartbeat so low and soft against the others that the Doctor wasn't sure if he had two hearts. But his mind was still sharp, still clean, and it threw up a shield as strong as rock-crystal.

They could hear the Matrix gearing up for the next attack, the clatter and grind of psychic cogs.

Five turned to grin tightly over his shoulder at his latest self. His longish canines gleamed in the clouded light (werewolf teeth). His boyish face was oddly beautiful in the dying light of the planet. Silky blond hair lifted in the static charge of atmosphere.

The second Adric-memory-arrow slid through the tender reality and Five leaped forward, striking it with the precision of a fine instrument. It burst against a patch of computerized fog, melting the illusion in a wildfire patch.

_"If you're going to do that,"_ he shouted into the fog that was the dying brain of the Matrix, _"Go up against someone who wasn't trained by W. G. Grace!"_

_"Showoff." _ Three said fondly. He had his sonic screwdriver out and was aiming it full-frontal into the boiling fog of manipulated Time. Something hissed and recoiled under its wavelength assault. _"You need to sit down with him, you know. He is far too much like you."_

_"Jealous." _ Two smirked, but a nanosecond later the humor was gone from both antagonists and they were facing off the cloud of mind pollution. The time for joking was done.

"Great balls of fire, will you get out of the way?" Three barked at Five.

_"I need a clean shot!" _ Five protested, lifting his bat in a stance that was not precisely according to the good old rules of the green.

_"Let our second me do the job!" _ Three yanked Five back, letting Two stand before the others in point. "You know what happened the last time!"

"Do it!" Two screamed.

* * *

_Last time?_ The Doctor was not so out of it that he didn't notice that odd phrase in the softness of Time.

_"Get out of here, boy! If it gets too bad **HE** will wake up! And we don't want that!" T_wo was screaming at the top of his lungs as Three, One, and Two clustered in to vanguard his plotted path.

He.

The Fourth Doctor.

The sleeping Titan.

Horror washed him at the thought of their Fourth waking up. The Doctor ignored the pain and took off running. But this was still the realm of the Matrix, and he could still hear what was happening.

* * *

_"Just because I can doesn't mean I should!" _ Five shouted at Two.

_"You may be better than us, but you don't have to rub it in our faces."_ Two's words were joking, but his face was pale and corpse-calm. _"Get ready, all of you. I can hear it coming. Twenty-four seconds."_

And to the Doctor's horror, Two slowly pulled away, small shoulders squaring inside his battered frock coat and bracing himself against the carnivorous fog coming their way. A memory resurfaced centuries lost: Two, coolly and quietly and single-handedly taking on an army vanguard of Ice Warriors, prepared to die with each step of the way but fighting to live until the enemy fleet was destroyed.

_Because they'd planned to attack Susan's World._

_And when finally caught and confronted:_

_"You have destroyed an entire fleet!"_

_"You tried to destroy a world." No venom in the statement, just quietly stating a simple fact. The King of Elfland patiently explaining to the humans who wish to explore: "Very well, but if man ventures where he is not wanted, or chooses to destroy, then do not blame us if we play tricks."_

_That was Two, through and through, and through. The Changeling Ancient in the body of a child._

_"Kill him!"_

_And Two stood ready for the killing blast, his head tilted back with a strangely peaceful expression, almost smiling, ready for the death about to come. He didn't even try to save himself...until he saw Jamie de-mat before him and then the accepting warrior turned frantic, whirling, jumping over the improbable consoles, grabbing the weapon in the Warrior's hand and aiming the charge at the commander. Jamie screamed his war cry, "Rock of the Boar!" And a cross-memory threaded across the Doctor...the Brigadier, shocking him with invoking his own clan's war-cry with "Rock of the Cormorant!"_

* * *

_"Ohno."_ Five gasped. Three grabbed him and triangulated him to a point just behind the space betwixt One and Two.

_"Twenty-two."_ One muttered. _"Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen..." The bluestone signet ring glowed on his finger in the madlight.  
_

Something howled in the nattering darkness forming within the choking Matrix. It chattered amongst itselves and giggled.

_"...eighteen..."_ One whispered. "Seventeen."

_"Jehosophat!"_ Three swore. _"Keep running!"_ He bellowed at the Doctor. _"Get past the Styx! Now! You won't survive this, and you must survive!"_

* * *

The Doctor ran.

He never knew how he did it, but later, his fragmented memories strongly indicated the possibility that First Three had sacrificed much of his energy in the Soft Time to give to him. It might explain why his ability to recall them was numbed and faulty for almost a year after his regeneration.

He fell, and something broke inside one leg. By this point in reality, Time was just beginning to implode upon the 16th and 27th Temporal streams. He fell forward into a patch of mist that smelled of sewage and singular dimensions and a black tendril of matter-memory crawled against his throat, seeking asylum.

The impact knocked him quite out of his head long enough that he didn't know where or when he was. All he knew was the scent of dust and the Matrix energy leaking into reality, and mismatched streams of dynamic logic into the space-time continuum. The Styx was like that; not completely fluid or solid. And here he was in the middle of its currents when he didn't quite know up from down.

The blow was far stronger than he'd realized. For unknown units of Time he'd sprawled upon the shattered bones of the planet, unaware and uncaring.

It would not be a bad time to die...just because he had a few generations left didn't mean he was supposed to live through them...

* * *

"_A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don't cry...where there's life there's..."_

* * *

_Damn you, you Dandy. _the Doctor swore at his third self._ Damn you for never giving up. Now I can't._

Blood pooled inside his navel from a slow-leaking slash over his ribs. He groaned and kept crawling. Behind him another explosion, and something screamed as it died a thousand reality-deaths. Some instinct told him Five and Two had just done something very final on the Matrix. Well, final on Five's part; Two was always more than happy to destroy something computer-related.

"_We are always in trouble! Isn't it extraordinary!" _

_Prophetic words from my First Self...And what had I just been telling Grace about trust...? He's brave,_ The Doctor thought dazedly. He'd never realized until now, just how very brave his Fifth Self was, and it was the same bravery motivating Two. _The two really were a lot alike. The bravest of all of us._

**CRACK**.

A supercharged pillar of atmospheric energy slapped the smoking ruin of the Matrix Outpost behind his back. The Doctor could hear ghosts, both artonic and logical, shriek and scatter to the winds. Sharp, sour scorchlings flitted past his face. He kept going.

TARDIS. TARDIS. TARDIS.

The dying Matrix was clouding his thoughts with its mind-pollution. It swirled dirty yellow biodata fog around his bloody fingers and whispered through the ruined city. He blinked to get its grit out of his eyes and his palm scraped against a humming plank of wood.

TARDIS.

She _sang_, piercing the veil covering his eyes and mind. He heard the door open. He smelled artronic energy building across her floor like a static charge: honey, cinnamon, cedar. Ozone and ions. He caught the perfume of physical arithmetic—sweet and citrusy—his body lifted in response, and he made it through the doorway on his own two feet instead of by crawling. The floor was cool and smooth against his cheek. The controls were going utterly madcap, just like his first regeneration. His mind didn't remember that time, but his body did. It asked him for permission to take over, and he gave it freely. His eyes closed and cell by cell, the lindos held back for so long fluttered and unfurled.

Eight lives down.

Now is for Nine.

Nine is the number of the dragon.

He slept, aware through his change that the TARDIS was spinning through a space and time that was no longer definable; with the anchor of Gallifrey gone, a vacuum in the Continuum had cut moors. The Mathematical had just turned from communitive to imaginative.

* * *

Interesting Earth Fact: It takes nine days from an anvil to fall from Heaven to Earth.

He didn't know about the mythology of it, but he did note that nine days passed before he came to himself.

* * *

He woke up on Thendel's Planet, the least significant Outpost world in the Old (former) Gallifreyan territories. The green sun was dappling through a pastel rainbow of colortrees over his head as a breeze sent the whistling vines into an harmonic tangent. It was blissfully cool on his face, he smelled fresh-cut bananagrass and he was lying on a hammock and he was no longer in pain.

And someone was playing Cole Porter.

Even for the Doctor, some things were _really_ too bizarre to be ignored.

The Time Lord moved his eyes from side to side, trying to figure things out. His body felt...

...oh, dear.

He looked at his hand, which no longer bled, broke, or smelled like poison. It was completely healed up but it was quite a bit rougher than his last one. This hand was designed for bending nails and breaking bricks for fun and profit.

There was rather a high possibility that the rest of him matched that hand...

Cole Porter had switched from … to ….. He turned his head on the pillow to see a young white-haired man in loose white trousers and a white Turkish vest walking through the bananagrass. The Doctor knew he was being rude, but...

"You can go ahead and say it," the young man grinned. "Everyone does. It makes them feel better."

"I...you look just like Duke Ellington. So why are you playing Cole Porter?"

"Why not? Beethoven played other masters...and when he went deaf he still played." A warm grin lit up the handsome face. "Besides, it's hard to walk with a piano. You look much better."

"Who are you?"

"A humble police surgeon. My family and I were having a vacation and then your ship came down out of the middle of nowhere." He tilted his head to one side, pointing with his eyebrows to the TARDIS resting just behind the Doctor's head. "Are you aware that under the current administration it is legally unsafe to ask a person's identity on this planet? I'm sure you aren't aware; you seem a nice sort. But the planet's current policy is that of neutrality as we await the outcome of the Time War."

"Outcome? Time War?" The Doctor sat up, head suddenly spinning. "What...I thought..."

"Take it easy, my boy. The Daleks and the Time Lords are all dead, but the aftershocks across the Galaxies are still happening!" The Police Surgeon grabbed him by the shoulders and eased him back down. "We just rode out a Normality Storm—you're lucky you slept through that!-but there are still bits and pieces of things settling back down to its original logic."

"Still settling?" The Doctor asked meekly.

"Still settling."

"That _would_ explain the polka-dots on the bananagrass."

"And the cloud formations." The Police Surgeon glanced askance straight up. "I can't say I approve of that much fractal paisley. My grandchildren cry every time they see it."

The Doctor very slowly sat up, rubbing his head. "Did I lose all of my hair?"

"Noooo, we found you this way..."

"Oh." He looked down at his arms, long and strong. "Thank you. Thank you very much."

"No need to thank me, my boy." The Police Surgeon grinned. "Come have something to eat. You look hungry."

It was the eeriest regeneration, having an open-air picnic under a rainbow forest. There were no Daleks, no wrecks, catalcysms, no _nothing_ except dinner with a clan of people that, had they been Time Lords, they would have been easily a sept within the Brightwater Clan of Gallifrey. The adults all had bright white hair but the younger ones had the coal-black of youth.

He reminded himself that repeating patterns were a fact of Nature, and it was an embarrassing feat of arrogance to look for differences and similarities in a Universe. Still, it was strange and unsettling to see the Thendellian equivalent of Brightwaters gadding about, the children laughing and playing on blue-striped Earth Recorders.

"Souvenirs," The Police Surgeon explained with a fond smile. "We pop to Earth every now and then. Discreetly of course. One could easily fall in love with that tiny planet...move in permanently. We might yet, but I have my duties."

The children proved they _weren't_ human by agreeing to play the same song at the same time. After some debate they broke into a nice version of SKYE BOAT SONG, which made the Doctor feel a terrific pang of nostalgia in his hearts.

"There we are! The next Handel Chorus!" The Police Surgeon laughed and leaned back in his chair. A large scar flashed over his liver, which almost made the Doctor remember something but the vest settled in place and he lost the thought before it started. "Do you need a place to stay? We have a permanent house in the clearing. It's a little primitive but we like things that way. The Burrowing Owl-Bats can be a problem during the full moons..."

"No, no, thank you. I...should be heading off soon." The Doctor cleared his throat. His regeneration fugue was fading.

"Well, stay the devil away from Omega's Triangle! That place is still popping with Normality Storms right and left. My son took a look on his radio telescope—hobby of his-and it sounded like someone was frying a greasy fish on a live citrine crystal!"

"Urk!" The Doctor flinched at the very notion, but his flinch was timed at a sudden and unmelodious tootling.

"Ragar!" The Police Surgeon scolded. "That is a noble instrument and deserves to be played with nobility!"

"But it's more _interesting_ to play it badly!" Ragar protested, making the Doctor jump inside his skin all over again.

"You're my grandson and I love you madly, but you aren't nearly clever enough yet to quote The Doctor to me!"

The Doctor was getting a little tired of that jumping-out-of-his-skin feeling. "The Doctor?" He repeated breathlessly.

"Hmn? Oh, yes. Haven't seen him in ages. Got the young ones interested in music, bless him forever and ever. You haven't seen the fellow have you? Funny little man, black hair like a dust mop. Sweet as a jermonolon, but the _tricksiest _eyes you ever saw in your life."

"Oh!" The Doctor felt himself go limp with relief at his verified anonymity. "I'm sure I'd remember someone like that!" He lied pleasantly. "But, it's a big Galaxy."

"That it is...no thanks to the Time War." The Police Surgeon smiled grimly. "Well, I suppose it's about time we learned to live without the Time Lords. I know for a fact we won't miss the Daleks, but there were times when we Colonists felt they were the same level of bad."

"Pity." The Doctor looked down at his new hands. He hadn't looked at his new face just yet. It was something he'd rather avoid.

"They never even apologised to us for the slave trade." The Police Surgeon said softly. "And how many thousands of thousands of years ago was that?"

"I...don't know." The Doctor rubbed his neck. It was full of strength. "Are you serious about wanting to live on Earth?" He tried to change the subject. "It's by turns unutterably dull and then relentless from what I hear."

"And yet interesting things keep happening that involve Earth." The Police Surgeon grinned. "And it does seem to bring interesting people!"

The Doctor smiled a little sadly at the thought. Somewhere, somehow, Susan's world had become his world too. Not of his own design or intention...it had just happened. There were times when he couldn't stand the sight of it, but also...he wondered about it in his absences. Most Earthers simply weren't equipped to deal with the Universal threats, and it was a wonder the planet hadn't been incinerated (outside of the Time Lord's scandal), cyber-converted, Dalekated, absorbed, consumed, blown up, fused or pushed out of its solar system (Time Lords again), thousands of times over.

Which reminded him (most uneasily) that not _all_ the Sentient and Intelligent planets chose to advertise themselves as such. Most of them lived out their entire lifespan from bare rock back to bare rock again and no one, even the High Evolutionaries, was ever the wiser. That always annoyed the High Evolutionaries, but it was true.

If Earth was a sentient body, perhaps his unexpected bond with her explained his feelings? That was a possibility and he ought to explore it some day...when he had the time.

"I should be heading back," he heard himself saying.

The Police Surgeon wiped his mouth on a napkin and rose. "I'll walk you back." He offered.

"Thank you."

"Not at all...Doctor." He winked.

He looked at the alien carefully as they walked away from the picnic area. "Did you always know it was me?"

"There aren't that many Timeships that look like yours." Was the answer. "Don't worry. Your secret's safe with me...with us. You helped me out of a bit of a stickiness in the past."

"I'm sorry I can't remember it."

"Oh, don't worry. I won't spoil things by telling you. You'll remember on your own I'm sure." The alien said confidently. "As you used to say, "Penny for your thoughts?"

"I'm not sure I have any right now." The Doctor confessed. "I've been separate from my people for most of my life. If I was around them it was usually because I had to be. And now...they're all gone and I'm the reason why they're gone."

"You can blame yourself for that if you want. The Time Lords were not a nice people. They stopped being a part of the natural order of things millions of years ago." The Police Surgeon stopped at the edge of the meadow and tried to smile. "All things have their time. Everything dies. So you told me."

The Doctor nodded absently, not quite able to respond with the subliminal observation that it didn't sound like something his _second_ self would say. More like his First or Eighth. They waved goodbye in Thendellian fashion, three fingers extended parallel to the waist, and he turned, walking through the fruity-smelling grasses. The TARDIS had a purple glow in the growing dusk. He smiled to see her. His fingers touched the blue-painted wood lovingly. Tension he hadn't owned to abruptly leaked out of his spine. For long minutes he simply stood there with her, touching the side of her door.

Home.

His eyes closed, soaking in the battered hull of the Timeship. He smelled roses. Earth Roses, and the petrichor of England after a soft rain. His old rose garden. When was the last time he'd been to see his old rose garden? A longing swept over him. Not since he'd been kidnapped by Borusa's Timescoop, surely. Unless he'd been there in his Eighth body, and who knew half the things he'd done back then? Eight was as much of an enigma as his poor little second self, and he'd just finished with being Eight!

Well, now he's Nine. The number of sorrow in Japan. The number of Virtues in the West. The number of the neuf preuses, or the Worthies between Christian, Jew, and Pagan in the Middle Ages. The number of the enemies of Egypt; the muses, and One of the more fortuitous numbers after 6. He's going to go scratch that itch of curiosity and see if anything's left of his old English estate.

Nine. The number of the Calculating Animal with Tail. Number of the Cat.

"How about it, old girl?" He whispered. His new voice rumbled pleasantly against the warm synthetic wood. Oh, he liked that sensation...and he felt she did too. "Want to go see the roses again? It's been a while."

* * *

Coincidentally, nine days later, the anvil falls to Earth and he gets there.

* * *

His rose garden is covered in a light white fluff of snow under a sky the gray of Dalekenium, the winter-sleeping branches thrusting upwards through perukes of glittering crystal. Every thorn has a tiny white cap and the snow is still coming down, heavy as soap flakes. The air smells of nitrite ions and it's all the most beautiful thing he's seen in ages. He sits in the snow in his new jacket, letting the cold of winter lap against his bones. The bushes demonstrate a graceful pattern of guided fractals, just slightly messy—quantum twigs and stems. Merely being out here cools the muttering in his still-sensitive head. A stray ginger cat pads delicately down the freshly-swept path, one soft paw following the other. Snow beads her long, proud white whiskers, dusts her foxy tail and perches on her cold-fluffed fur. He smiles. She's a hunter and a good one. She knows he's there but is polite and ignores him because he doesn't exactly want to be seen. Cats know. They're like him. The cat walks by himself.

He takes a deep, deep breath until the ions make him a little dizzy, and closes his eyes to feel the flakes settle into his thick lashes. His likes his hair this short. He feels as though he's breathing through the top of his skull. In this electric winter his body tingles and a much-bruised mind is starting to stir and—finally-ask a few questions.

The Doctor is, ironically, enough of a cat that he takes his personal sense of self for granted instead of thinking it overtly unique (a superior intellect sees clearly and obviously). Plus, he is too shell-shocked from the Time War to probe into his own memories too sharply. He can get as far back as Six but after that...things get...

...muddled.

No, scratch that. His timeline before Six loses _definition_; a mountain just barely outside the optimal range of a telescope. To a _Time Lord_ nothing is as threatening/frightening as the loss of perspective. It's like watching amnesia or mental deterioration slowly come across his world, filling up boundaries and objects with meaning with flake after flake of cold white oblivion.

The Time War is finally starting to be real to him, and he's relieved. The protective layer of cold numbness was not normal, nor was it healthy. He was alive and he'd better start living, because the second the last Normality Storm flickered out there would be so many things out there ready to step in and take over for the Daleks and the Time Lords. And none of them were the sort that should be trusted with planning a dinner menu, much less dictating to the health of the Universe.

"_Time will tell. It always does." _ Seven, the Merlin of the Doctors, and his seven most famous syllables. Though his words spun poetry out of reality, he was at his most poignant at his briefest.

"_I'm a Time Lord. I walk in Eternity."_ Four's rich, rumbling voice echoed in his ears with the power of a deep musical instrument cut of the softest of woods. The Doctor was ferociously glad he could remember that much of himself that far backwards. Four is still a Titan, still sleeping. He is relieved. They have all known, past and future, that if Four was ever roused, it would be cataclysmic.

"_A man is the sum of his memories...a Time Lord more than most..."_ Five groaning in a pain too deep within to articulate with the volume the atrocity deserved. It had hurt him to even talk, but he struggled through the agony of non-being to explain what was happening to Turlough and Teagan.

_"In all my travelings across the universe, I have battled against evil. Against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed here! The oldest civilization, decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core. Power-mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen... They're still in the nursery compared to us! Ten million years of absolute power; that's what it takes to be REALLY corrupt!" _

Oh, they had not liked that at all! Six had been their laser wit. He remembered that. He remembered being able to slice his opponents to atoms and loving every second of the act. Six had burned like a dwarf star; his bright clothing should have been a warning for others to stay away, or to approach at their own peril. Six had fought every inch of the way to be himself, to be true to himself, and sacrificed himself for the greater good at the same level of fervency.

Of them all, the Doctor hopes that Six understands what he did to Gallifrey. He loathes himself enough that he can barely get through one day to the next...he wants to not be alone. He wants to talk with other people again, and move among living beings even if he does feel self-polluted. Right now sitting under a snowstorm in England is the closest he can get to that.

He thinks Six _would_ understand. Six' rage at being abused had not been as bright as his outrage of what the Time Lords had done to Earth. Earth! Terrible enough to destroy an entire world, but he _liked_ Earth and all its messy flaws and confabulations. Humans were a frightful mess more often than not, but so was temporal physics.

For all the mess and fuss and muss and rough stuff, Humans would shape the Universe as eagerly and as creatively as any High Evolutionary. And when a Human wanted to make the Universe a better place...then they did just that.

The Doctor stays where he is, and thinks and thinks and thinks while the snow fills the world with soothing white. He has been reborn for the eighth time. He needs to think, and decide what his perspective and personal reality is.

A Time Lord's regenerations really aren't that different from human reincarnations—the biggest differences are miniscule: A human is a malleable personality that responds beautifully to its stimulus but the disadvantage to this talent is its difficulty to cultivate its own personality against negative influence of others'. Because of this, a human hardly ever remembers their own past lives unless that is a natural part of their upbringing.

There's also the fact that a human has to be reborn in _every_ sense of the word to get to the next life. The Doctor is glad he doesn't have to go through adolescence and hormones ever again—once was enough for anybody (and if you asked his cousins, quite enough for them as well)!

But you can't ask his cousins. You can't ask anyone. You can't even ask him because he doesn't exactly want people to know where he is right now. It is not only wise to keep his mouth shut and his head down, _it is polite._

People who destroy worlds, much less their own, aren't the sort wanted over for tea.

* * *

The Doctor winces against the throb of a new headache and his fingers stumble across the smooth wrinkle of his leather sleeve. He knows his hands now. His face isn't bad. His head has been one ongoing domino-tumble of throb after throb since his regeneration. The good bit is that typical regenerative amnesia isn't hitting him quite as hard as it has in the past. Errr...that is to say, there seems to be more of _him_ this time. It's possible that his brain, damaged from his regeneration into Eight, was able to fix some of those old problems with the next go around.

He doesn't remember sleeping much in the past, but now sleep is a fantasy, a fairy tale—an evil spell that could take him past the realm of safety. In those endless hours of consciousness between Thendel and Earth he set his TARDIS to automatic and stayed up, reading book after book. He listened to music, or mathematical orchestras. He lowered the portal in the TARDIS and just listened to the music of the spheres in his lonely hours.

He is still so very tired but still on the edge. Reality still bends under the weight of his heavy eyes. He went through _many_ books. Except for his old diary. That would have been useful. He doesn't keep his diary about him like Two; one of his few surface-memories of Two was of a thick black-bound volume stuffed into the bottomless depths of his black coat pocket. He doesn't know where the book is now. Probably lost or stuffed in a pipe or maybe it just went wandering. Things that stay too long in a TARDIS tend to wander.

The best time to regain lost memories is in the tender phase between regenerations. That time is fading, bit by bit, snowflake piled upon snowflake. He thinks about his earliest selves dutifully, the way a good son would pay close attention to the stores of his ancestors...but that part of himself is pure quagmire. Is this another part of getting older? Had he already reached the "overlap" phase of life? Normally that would have happened in his last regenerations but it must be admitted that he's done more in any _one_ of his lives than most Time Lords ever did in seven!

In his perspective Two and Three are physically and dynamically disparate, but so mentally much alike it is difficult to separate the timelines from each other. Three had a _terrible_ habit of saying things that sounded just like Two:

"_A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting."_

Four's needle-sharp wisdom prickled icelike out of his memory and into the now: _"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs __altering."_

The Doctor thinks of his Sixth self's fury of his trial, and wonders why he hadn't held on to the anger just a little longer...just long enough to apply himself and even look to see if the corruption of Gallifrey could be tackled.

Five's words echoed at that question: _"You know how it is; you put things off for a day and next thing you know, it's a hundred years later."_

Six agreed:_ "Planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, forms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal."_

Seven:_ "Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold."_

* * *

The Doctor felt his face grin. "Come on, Ace." He repeated in the softness of the snowfall. "We've got work to do."

Because there was always work to do, always the need to patch a hole or spring a needed leak or turn red to green and round to square. That was how things worked.

He hadn't destroyed Gallifrey out of joy or pleasure, but because there had been no choice. He was alive because his own people had thought he was enough of a Gallifreyan that he would obey their commands and subvert his will to theirs.

As Jamie MaCrimmon would have said in court, "Not so."


	10. 10: Unlucky Master

The Master fought long and hard to jump into this fic, and finally...he won. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

A bit of the life, lifted out of The Year That Never Was.

Characters: The Doctor (Ten) The Brigadier; Martha Jones' sister Tish, mentions of Lucy Saxon and some bizarre little fellow in a shabby black coat and wild hair who does impossible things.

* * *

The world is on fire and the Thames is frozen.

Blood-red knives of sunlight are rising over London. There was a time when he liked nothing more than to watch this moment—sunsets and the misty ghostlights are something Scotland truly excels at—but London? London is special when the sun returns.

The Doctor's face is drawn tight from lack of sleep and peace. Winter is cold, bitterly so and that's not unusual for London...what's odd about this winter is the snow. There's simply megatons of it falling all over Europe. For three days it fell in slow-motion, dirty, grey and smelling of atmospheric pollution. After that the snow grew whiter as it ran out of particle interference. The city was now layered like a Rigellian wedding-cake—shades of grey and white and grey and white and now the winds are picking up feathery plumes of granulated ice off the frozen cap of the Thames. It is extremely odd for the residents to see a river like the Thames freeze up. The brine levels alone make this a grand effort of Natural Chemistry and their life spans are too short to remember their last Ice Age.

The good news is it's hampered the Toclofane and they aren't out in this...because to be bald about it, there aren't many chances to find a troublesome citizen to hunt in these conditions. It isn't much fun for them, but they did learn that overhanging icicles were sparkly and loud when you bowled through them like so many ninepins.

Small favors. Somehow, that makes the shivering humans feel a little better as they scrape up their next meal out of anything and everything. Small favors get them through.

Small as they get.

The Doctor is sleep-deprived to the point that his eyes are sore. In this altered form, everything tastes the same. Like nothing. He goes through the motions, and the Master makes sure he eats. He can't risk getting the Master's attention in the wrong area.

It is difficult to live from day to day, because it requires day to day camouflage. The Master isn't stupid. He is a Time Lord. This situation wouldn't stop the Master. The Master's been in even worse situations than this and he's _always_ survived them...so he isn't going to insult the Doctor by thinking he can't. If there's one thing the Master can't stand, it's having an idiot for an enemy.

In a warped sense, what the Doctor feels now is an encapsulated form of what the Master has felt throughout most of their combined lives. The Master had never been a stranger to trouble, but once he went bad (as opposed to the Doctor's rouge), he went bad all the way, and the Doctor had been one of the forces to deal with him. Too often that meant incarceration or leaving him for dead. Again and again he walked away from the Master, mourning him in his mind, and again and again he came back.

So.

If he didn't engineer a small act of rebellion once in a while, the Master would stop being _quite_ so pleased with his successes, and start getting suspicious (never a faraway possibility when your paranoia is at critical mass levels). The Doctor is incapable of being idle or accepting his fate. It is one of the many traits he shares with the Master. Time Lords aren't good with defeat. Even extinct, they still top the Universe's Worst Losers List.

Most of their current relationship took flesh when he was in his third body and the Master was seeing his "last". It was king against king and queen against queen, rook to bishop and knight to rook and it would take a prize dunce to overlook the significance of their board: Earth.

The Master said once in wry bitterness, that it _always_ came down to Earth with the Doctor.

The Master thinks he knows why Earth is so important to the Doctor. The Doctor is perfectly willing to perpetrate the misunderstanding. If there's one thing he's learned from the past, it's that people usually stop looking when they 1) decide what they're looking for, and then 2) find it. No one digs below the bottom of the well.

The Master finds Ten a boring number. Terribly, terribly boring. It's so...nice. It's a perfectly nice number, five, multiplied by two. It's perfect. It's too perfect. It's so perfect it is monotonous in its perfection; it hammers its glorious superior perfection into the imperfect Universe and the Master didn't really like anything associated with Ten. He didn't even like his own tenth incarnation. He hadn't had much luck when he was a Ten. Yes, he's still rather nostalgic about that operatic dandy with the yellow car. It had been so much _fun_. The best he can do out of respect for those happier, simpler battles is track down the Brigadier and ensure his thorough lockup in his Antarctic Base.

The holidays are coming up, and what's a good holiday without proper tribute? This holiday was in the middle of northern hemisphere's worst weather, cold as a cobblemouse's prospects on the south side of Mount Lung. He was going to celebrate in his own special way, by opening the security cameras and letting the Doctor wish the old Brig a Happy Christmas. Ah, Sir Allistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. Ten syllables of annoyance from the old days. The Master tended to chuckle to himself at odd occasions about that particular bit of mischief, which alarmed Lucy worse than the threat of a beating. She doesn't know what he's laughing at because the Master keeps this little bit of information to himself as a cheerful little secret. He's going to enjoy this moment so very much.

Its his latest campaign of revenge against the number 10.

He picks up the sanitized news of the day and skims it over for anything amusing. That problem with being the total dictator of the world is if there's new news you probably aren't happy about it because it isn't good news. Dictators make their own news. He sniffs because the most interesting report under his gaze is the latest on a billiards tournament (grown more popular since the Master had in a fit of admitted pique, outlawed cricket in tribute to the Fifth Doctor, and billiards because it was bound to irritate the non-cricket crowd. Tomorrow he'll probably outlaw football-just to see if Chile will finally up and rebel. He drops the paper and steps on it on his way to the window. Billiards, pah.

The Master ignores the human game of billiards because of the frequency of 10 in its logistics. Normally the game would amuse him to pieces; it's an elegant slaughter of mathematics, physical skill and tactics and geometry, and despite the sheer braininess of the game_ the elites _occasionally dabble in it when they're playing politics with the other children, but they view it as a commoner's sport and the conceit is ridiculously amusing. The Master has hobnobbed and moonlit his way through smoke-choked dives and hovels where the poorest and roughest of the poor put out every penny they owned over a game between two equally matched wizards in the art. Those undercover escapades are the closest he's come to reliving his reckless youth in Shobogan dens. It's high math and brawny gladiators put together, certainly more hygienic than cockfighting (and better for the planet because only human lives are at stake), and people actually maim and kill each other over the games (another reason to be amused; just last week the Master read, _howling_ with laughter, the juicy details about an international fracas with billiards involving a retired Admiral, his loyal East-Londoners, a troupe of arrogant expatriate Indian colonists, three orphans, and the entire damned crew of the HMS TEAZER). 1 The whole thing reminded him why humans were occasionally worth keeping around: they could attract the most bizarre trouble.

Billiards is an elegant massacre of mathematics and strategy is usually locked within the world of the peasantry, but because of the reliance on the perfection of the triangle of ten balls he finds the game avoidable. He looks elsewhere at tetrahedrals because they are all about the number ten. He grumbles at the sight of close packed hexagonals—who knew humans used cphs so much in architecture? But they are and they are _everywhere_. Humans should be glad he only destroyed 10% of the population—a decimation, if you were, of a species is an appropriate sacrifice. If one felt like resisting the pun, they wouldn't say, "pay tithe" (a tenth) but the Master has no reason to resist. It's delightful.

He wonders if the Doctor has noticed the pun of his actions—the use of 10 in his culling of the herds. Some of his incarnations would not only notice they would have said something about it—dear little Five could never keep his indignation to himself, which made him all the more amusing (when he wasn't being a tiresome little brat).

The Master busies himself with the latest reports on the work-camps, snickering at how he's grown ahead of schedule for the rocket development and wondering if he should do something about that recently-discovered lump of Delekenium in...Utah? Nevada? Some boring desert. Whatever. It might come in handy. Martha Jones' sister serves him a silent tray of tea as he reads, and he grows so interested in the Dalekenium problem he forgets to throw the remnants at her. He doesn't remember until she's left the room to finish her other chores. Ah, well, mustn't be too predictable. Maybe next time...

The Master scrolls through a final summary of mercury stores, unhappy that there's no way of avoiding the fluid intakes. There had been a time when he'd dreaded space-time travel because of mercury; it was the easiest element for the Time Lords to track. For years the Master couldn't hope to even the rudest of backwaters for a supply run without feeling nervous about his chances. He sometimes wonders how the Doctor avoided the Temporal Gestapo. Or Magnus. Or the Rani, for that matter. Drax didn't bear thinking about. He was probably the only renegade the Time Lords had avoided because of the annoyance factor. The Doctor in his third body had solved the mercury problem, but the Master can't apply Three's wizardry to his rockets; Three was a hardheaded, stubborn old thing, and he'd achieved the impossible by literally convincing his TARDIS to compensate with alcohol instead of mercury.

The Master finished work and tapped a code into his laptop. The security camera instantly pulled up a familiar image: an old, human man grown thin and frail in confinement. The Master insisted on keeping him in his UNIT uniform, and the old soldier had predictably kept good care of himself to keep from dishonoring his badge of office. He was currently seated inside the main room of his guest quarters, patiently working on a paper clock model. His arthritic hands were shaking but he moved slowly to compensate for the loss of dexterity. The Master scowled, because it would severely restrict his plans if the old fossil died on him before he could surprise the Doctor.

With that thought came another. He smirked to himself, half-surprised at his ability to think of something that would upset the Brigadier so much, and wrestled with his conscience. Normally he didn't wrestle with his conscience at all—it had enough sense to stay out of his way, but there was the admitted logistic problem of diverting power...power he should really be using for rocket development.

Oh, why not? One only lived one life at a time!

He giggled to himself, stabbed a few codes into the computer, and laughed out loud when the RECEIVE message popped back. Sometimes he was just so clever. "Stone cold brilliant," The Doctor had said of him. So true. So very, very true. He'd just found another way to make the Doctor and the Brigadier more miserable. Christmas was going to be _fun_ this year. It would light up like neon.

Neon. The element of 10. Rather like the Doctor in his 10th form—flighty, never quite grounded and luminescent.

On a plane more suited to his megalomania, the Master admits there _are_ times when Ten coincides with his tastes very well. Take, for example, The Tenth Verse in that book of superstitious poetry the humans swore by on this part of the world was called The Creation. He likes that ironic parallel to his own actions. Like their mythological God, he called, gathered...and it was good.

The Prime Minister of England lived at 10 Downing Street. The Commoners simply called it "Number 10." He loved that the Tenth Doctor had to take orders from Britain's Number Ten.

10 is the number of the playmaker in English football. _That's_ rather a cute little connection.

One thing those silly little humans got right. They too believed that numbers had souls (either that or Pythagoras stole the concept from another drunken wandering alien. The Master can't understand why ancient Greece was such a fascinating time for Galactic tourists to come calling...the planet's era must have been a fad of some sort). He doesn't give them too much credit for that shared insight with Gallifreyans: broken clocks being right twice and all that, etc., etc.

A flutter of ice clatters against the glass of his office window. The Master looks up and watches the crystals streak slowly down to the frozen sill. _The Master is bored. _ Bored enough that he's even letting his brain wander off without him, and just look where it went. It goes to show you can't turn your back on anything, including yourself.

Ten. He was being annoyed about Ten. Ten is the smallest possible noncototient. It has only three possible divisors: One and Two and Five, which, purely by bizarre happenstance and Pythia-level-spooky-meta-coincidence, just _happens_ to be the numerical values of the three most infuriating of the Doctors' collective lives (Five is adorable when he's angry, but still infuriating).

The First—The Master shudders to remember how that once-creative and interesting thinker collapsed under the weight of his own familial obligations to turn into that dried-up old husk of a boring, pompous old Time Lord (emphasis on the "Lord" half). Centuries—three whole centuries-of screaming at him to wake up, grow up and see the cold, hard Universe as it really was hadn't done a thing to make Thete smarter—oh, no, he had to run headlong into the scandal of that mess with Arkytior to get _that_ far in wisdom. And for what? Jumping planet clean off Gallifrey in a _stolen_ TARDIS with an _underage_ child when he was physically a mere century shy before his _first_ regeneration?!

The Master snorted in disbelief when he first heard the scandal, for that plot would have been rejected as rubbish by even the most sensational of fiction writers. A rebel in his elder years? Who would have thought? Stubborn, stubborn...but in so many ways it reminded the Master of what the Doctor was really about: Decisive action, too late. Only a desperate or crazed idiot would have become a fugitive in such an aged body with a toddling child in tow.

Which just goes to show, the Doctor has never been an ordinary crazed, desperate idiot. He had the luck of the idiots with him—there was a quote that Terran poet said about defending stupid and crazy people that applied to him rather neatly.

The Master looks up from his desk for the moment, his quicksilver gaze afixed to the hypnosis of snowfall. This is such a wet, soggy world. The Martians were brain-impaired to even think of taking it over. Stupid green hissers. It would have been nice if the Doctor had settled in the Sahara or the core of the Arctic before the Climate Change. But, no, he _liked_ the mold-culture zones. There were times when he wondered if the rumours about the Doctor's mother really were rumours. At the very least it would provide a logical explanation for his bizarre fondness for humans (one of these days he would have a talk with Jane Goodall and try to get an insight as to her fondness for primates; the two relationships were identical). Honestly, who volunteered to stand up for primates? And ones that hadn't even discovered their true evolutionary roots in Aquatic Africa at that!

There were days when it was a burden to be so superior.

The Master is terribly, terribly bored with his successes. There, he's admitted it. There's nothing much going on, and he could stir up some trouble, or poke a new hole in Canada, but the fact of the matter is, he shouldn't be too predictable of a dictator. The planet's psyched up to expect some sort of attack upon a population here or a country there on a daily basis, and that causes a dangerous level of numbness. Truly desperate people do annoying things like try uprisings and revolts. Besides, it's fun to not do what your cowering populace thinks you're going to do. A reliable factor for the human race is their toxic level of imagination. Every day he doesn't attack something is a day in which they cower all the harder. So he's made the sensible political decision and given himself a day off from the usual routine of killing. That was bearable for all of two hours, but he's seriously getting bored now. Bored enough that he isn't even going to bother looking up Lucy for entertainment. Bored enough that he doesn't even want to plot out his upcoming invasion of the Galaxies.

You know you're bored when even the prospect of harassing the so-called Dominators doesn't appeal.

The Master looks down at his hand, which is stubbornly right-dominant this time around. It's been scrawling glyphs all over his stationary while he was buried in thought. The Master frowns, for a mathematical pyramid isn't normally his idea of a good time. And a pyramid for the number 10 is less of anyone's fun. Ech.

Ten is the divisor of one and two and five.

He must have had five on the brain; look at the number of times he'd written it.

Five.

The Master remembers him easily, and with just a bit of pity. So young on the inside and the outside. He was the personification of the Doctor he remembered in their youth just before their final growth-cycle: the boy that wanted to play, but was too timid to fight for his place in the teams. He wanted to be asked in, because Rassilon knew, Thete couldn't bring himself to go where he wasn't wanted. It was just one of the many things they'd fought about. The Master had fought for his place, fought for respect, and when he was shut out of the teams at school...physically put himself in. Thete never took that route. He preferred to back away quietly, even if the others despised him for his weakness.

The young Thete had fought as hard as Koschei had in just being himself. Harder, perhaps... If anything could make the Master's House feel sympathy to another Gallifreyan, it would be to witness how Thete's own family looked down upon him. One's parents weren't enough when the majority of your House was in dire need of a whipping boy—The Master knew that as a sum truth.

But all their lives, Thete had been something and someone the Master had needed to know.

"_Have you tried to understand?"_ Thete had argued in class over and over at his other classmates, and also their own teachers. _"An equation is not a solution! An equation is a map! How can you solve a problem if you don't understand it?"_

_Very well, Doctor, but you never tried to understand **me**, did you?_

The Master has hammered this question into his own brain so long that he believes this to be true. Hids memory has eroded a bit with time, but thankfully he doesn't forget things in his regenerations like the Doctor.

The Doctor's memory losses are—were-rare for a Time Lord, but it explained his different personalities. There was simply less bleedover from the past into the present. And without the Doctor's family to bolster his identity (or decide which bits and pieces he should retain), he lost memory with each regeneration. Most of these memories can only be excavated with great effort and detail. The good news is it leads to great entertainment value. Five could not have been Five if he'd remembered his past clearly. Watching him rant about the value of life was like their Academy days. Thete had managed to alienate most of their class with his values—not because they were false, but because he could not keep out of the cardinal sin of separation. Thete couldn't avoid his personal investment in an issue and that left him unclean. He never understood that. Never. Poor naive, silly fellow. Entertaining, but silly. And the way he placed his enemies' lives upon his own head? Oh, tut. So noble and self-sacrificing. Such a non-wonder that he burnt out like a star from the weight of his own responsibility. A young form and an ancient soul.

One's equation: "If one is oppressed all others are oppressed."

Five's equation was twofold: The five virtues of Japan: Loyalty, compassion, justice, honor, and respect. In their absence was Five's Five worst qualities: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (The Fifth Doctor accepting his fate? Oh, ugh).

**1**

**/ \**

**5 2**

The Master scowled at his scribbles. In _all_ the Galaxies, 2 was the first number of discord; the first number for division, the first number to stand as rival to the first number in creation. The first Paradox. The first freedom from rules.

Two's equation: The first number to replicate One, and thus simultaneously creating the first harmony and the first contradiction at the same time: for two was both the first unity and mental division. Silly little, foolish, contradictory Two. Two was the number of Pandora's Box. Two was the genie in the bottle. Two was the 'after' in the 'happily ever after' and the Master, who thought of the ragged little tramp as being the only Universal Inconstant, was frequently annoyed at mathematically parsing him.

Everyone knew one's first regeneration was...flawed.

The fact that he'd survived his first change by himself said something about the character of will (and again, reminded the Master that he didn't pick unworthy adversaries. Even the flawed, broken versions of the Doctor were worthy in their own way). But the Doctor's new self had resembled less a regeneration and more like one of those old mythological TARDIS renewals. There was a very good reason why the Time Lords chose to separate themselves from those obsolete craft; the longer they were in those strange old Timeships the greater the chance that the ship would change them. You never saw anyone with a scrap of self-respect piloting a Type 40. Just look at Ushas; if there had been _any_ redeeming value to the old models she would have said so.

The Master had blessedly little experience with the Doctor in his second form. Just his fashion nonsense was enough reason to stay away. Had the man no pride? The Doctor in that form simply hadn't _understood_. Socially awkward. Inept. Crazed, possibly. The Master flattered himself with his expertise on crazy. It was as though every stifled impulse Thete had locked down in his youth had jumped out upon his Change.

Two's infuriating habit of playing the clown when he was far from a clown...what a cosmic joke. The Master's lip twisted in recollective distaste. All that energy and cleverness, wasted yet again on his high-handed morals. He wouldn't have been caught and force-regenerated without them.

The Master frowned as an ancient memory flickered up. It was old; more than 500 years if you went by the old Gallifreyan clock. He rose to his feet with his frown still glued to his young face. It made him look as deadly as he really was. He left the office and walked to the holding area.

The Doctor was slumped in his corner, frail skull pressed to the floor with his eyes half-shut. When the Master drew close, he made the effort to lift his head. His arms trembled from the strain.

"You never heard the drums, did you." The Master bent to whisper into the closest ear.

The Doctor never blinked, because they'd already had this conversation. "No."

"What do _you_ hear, when you're alone?"

The Doctor blinked, uncomprehending.

"Do you hear the War? The Other War? The Galactic War?"

_The Galactic War?_ The Master could read the confusion in the wizened up face without telepathy. "...no."

Not sure to be relieved or disappointed, the Master returned to his office. The Doctor's filmy eyes studied holes inside his spine the entire way.

* * *

Well, that was pointless. The Master scowled at himself. What was it about the Doctor, that even getting a straightforward answer wasn't satisfying?

He leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled together in deep thought. The security screen across the desk showed the Doctor was staying put exactly where he'd been left. Wise of him. He was due for another escape attempt soon...must remember to let him get a little further this time. Good for morale.

The Master's lips quirked up as a familiar figure crossed the pixelated images. Martha Jones' little sister. She was worth keeping around just for the amusement value; she hated him so much. But it was also feeding time at the zoo. This might be good for a few chuckles. He set the cameras to track them both and settled back, feet propped on his papers.

"Doctor?"

The Doctor has already lifted his head once today, and doesn't really want to do it again, but Tish is there and she's kneeling at his side and she is worried. She's a lovely girl, even if she doesn't know it. Tish glows like a flame under carnelian. "Doctor, I've got you some soup today. It's miso. Do you like it?"

"I suppose." He agrees faintly. She doesn't know it all tastes like ash. He'll accept it and smile. "I can't remember when I had it last."

"Oh. Well, neither can I." Tish smiles feebly. The Master makes a point of feeding her family better than anyone else. It fosters resentment with the other prisoners and doubles their shame. She is aware of the Doctor's diminished strength, and fills the soup cup one-third of the way. He can bear that weight, and cradles the cup in both of his hands, letting the warmth ease the induced arthritis. He sips slowly.

The girl hasn't slept properly in months. Small wonder. She's worried for her parents and terrified for her sister. Her labor is grueling for its mental strain. And it saddens him that there's enough room in her heart to worry about him.

"I think I remember now." He said slowly. "Yes. Reminds me of the Thames."

Tish is surprised into a giggle. "Miso isn't the Thames."

"Well you get seaweed in both, don't you?" He asks innocently. "But that's not what I meant."

"I don't understand."

"It's the color." He tips the almost-empty mug to show her the broth. Like all good miso, it is cloudy with bits and tofu. "Reminds me of the last time I got caught in it. The Thames, I mean. Not the miso."

"You were in the Thames?" Tish is amazed, impressed, and sympathetic. The Thames is not something one seeks to join.

"Well, not on purpose. It was an accident. I was much clumsier back when I was younger." He took one last drink. "Much, much younger. Really much younger. Not as young as you, but as far as my people go, I was still a sprat. Hadn't even met my prime."

"How old were you?"

"Let's see...according to myself back then, I was 451 years old. Embarrassing when you think about it."

"That doesn't sound young to me."

"Age is just a number, Tish. Age is also how you behave."

"Are you saying you were acting like a child back then?"

"I'm sure I was. I don't remember everything about that time, but that was because I was paying more attention to what was going on around me, rather than pay attention to myself."

Tish is a younger, softer version of Martha. She's also rawer in her youth; her softer face burns with a need to be. She'll follow orders and do as she's told because she loves her family that much. She might be unhappy at being the child of flawed parents, but she loves them all the same and that's why she's mostly boring to the Master. It amuses him that the Doctor behaves out of fear for the girl's safety. His worry for her never leaves his wrinkled face. His milky eyes watch her quietly when she serves the Master his tea and whatever else he demands.

"I've nearly died in London more than any other place in the Galaxy, actually." The Doctor rasps. His voice gives out for a moment, and he coughs. Tish hands him a soft cloth and he uses it to catch his breath. "I shouldn't love it if you think about that. But I do. She's got a hold over me."

"Did it happen all at once?" Tish asks him.

The Master is rather surprised at the question. Pesky Humans. They're not predictable enough to be completely tiresome, like say, the Martians or Sontarans or Cybermen or Daleks. Their potential for violence is just as high, but they aren't evolved enough to fit among the other threats.

"No...no it didn't. But one day I came closer to death than I ever have...and it was _here_. Down in the depths." He took a deep breath. "When I came out of that, I was different. I remember that. I don't remember everything about my second life, but I remember that."

_You don't remember being the shabby little tramp?_ The Master grins and leans closer to the screen. _I don't blame you. Nothing but bad fashion choices. I did admire his improvisation. That kept things interesting, you know. He knew how to be random. Random is something I've learned._

"Martha said you...change your body when it wears out." Tish said slowly.

The Doctor smiled at her. "Yes."

"It sounds like reincarnation without the dying."

"It is, actually...but...you see, I do die. Each person I become...I'm still me, but I'm also different."

"Oh, that's ok." Tish shrugged. "My best friend's like you."

"She is?"

"Ajita. Her mum's Nepali. She remembers her past lives pretty well." Tish crunched on a carrot stick matter-of-factly, unaware that she had managed to rile up the interest of two superior beings. "When she was a kid it was nothin' but trouble, you know?"

"Trouble?" The Doctor asked. It was exactly what the Master had been thinking.

"Yeah. She remembered her childhood in other lives, so, well, she _hated_ the food at school. Kept asking for things they didn't have. Her mum and my mum had to practically go on a Crusade to find yak's butter that tasted "real" to her. It's a little hard to get." Tish had finished her carrot. "It got easier after she grew up a little. She went to veg because it was easier, but she's not against eating meat so long as she kills it herself."

"Ah..."

"She called growing out of those memories, 'letting the past go to sleep so she could wake up.' This was who she needed to be, and who she wanted to be." Tish catches herself, and flushes. "Rambling. Sorry." She hasn't talked to anyone besides her folks in weeks.

"Well, I don't have problems like that. Mostly it's a case of remembering what I need to remember." The Doctor was smiling a little. Ajita. That means "a winner..."

"That's right!" Tish was frog-eyed, she was so impressed. "How'd you know that?"

"I've been to Nepal." He told her. "Several times." He frowned slightly. "Come to think of it, I was in my Second body all the times...I suppose I can remember a bit more than I thought. They gave me a name...but I can't remember it."

Tish looked puzzled. "You're supposed to be smarter than us. You and the Master."

The Doctor blinks tiredly. "That somehow reminds me...someday I should ask the Master if he had anything to do with my trip into the Necropolis."

_Nec—no._ The Master tilts his head to one side. _Can't say I recall that._

"Do you think he'd tell you?" Tish asked him.

"Probably not. Pity. It was...clever." The Doctor said ruefully. "Dangerous, too. Sort of the thing he could scheme up. Clever and dangerous and...gruesome."

_Oh? Tell me more._ The Master leaned forward and just ever so slightly, adjusted the sound. This was much more interesting than watching the surviving Aleutians build reclamation camps for the surviving Japanese.

"I was in the Underground after the—oh, that's too much explaining. I was in the Underground helping the Brigadier mop up the traces of a Cyberman Invasion." The Doctor stopped and took a deep breath. "I remember getting separated from the others...knowing me, I saw something interesting, or maybe I was chasing a white rabbit with a pocket-watch. I was just that sort of fellow back then." His rueful voice made Tish chuckle under her breath.

"I can't imagine you chasing after a white rabbit."

"What? Well, I probably wouldn't. Given a choice I'd run after a grey rabbit, or a black rabbit, or one of those bunnies with the silly ears all floppy-loppy. Maybe I wouldn't chase the black rabbit...isn't that the God of Death for rabbits?"

"Uh..." Tish stalled out, but she wasn't stupid, and she, like many British children, had been forced to endure the agony of WATERSHIP DOWN in her formative years. And also like most British children, owed her first 'serial nightmares' to the animated film. "It's a rational and fictionalised account of rabbit mythology." She assured him. "We don't really know what rabbits believe in."

The Master applauded loudly at the save. Young people learned _so_ quickly, and she'd learned that most important lesson: When the Doctor rambles, ramble back.

"Oh. That makes sense. Well, London's simply layered with history. And unlike a lot of old cities, those layers are clear. It might be why I like it so much. The Timelines are usually linear over here—not at all like Scotland."

"Scotland?" Tish asked weakly, as though she knew she might regret this but was going to ask anyway.

"Yes. Scotland's very non-linear. Be careful walking around the Highlands on the deosil. Especially when the geothermals are bubbling. The dimensional wyverns get all cross."

"I...I...I'll...try to remember that."

"The trouble was, I walked bang into another layer of Time without knowing it. That doesn't happen to me much...probably why I remembered it." The Doctor gave back his empty mug and laid back on the floor, closing his eyes against the strain. Tish refilled it. "One minute I was in the Underground hoping to scour out the last bits of Cybermen. The next minute, as fast as one step to the next, I was out of the tunnel and into an old underground culvert with rude Latin graffiti chalked over the bricks. Horrid place to be. Ice was clotted all over the sides and even though it was so cold you could see your breath freeze, the smell was just awful. Like raw, rotting pig's intestines and hooves and blood. Bones everywhere."

"Yuck!" Tish exclaimed, which the Master found impressive. He would have thought the brat had been completely desensitized to horrors by now, but Humans were vulnerable to smell. It was probably why they didn't have that many olfactory organs. They'd probably shut down or go mad if they could smell half as well as Time Lords (note to self: investigate use of scent for mind control later; might be fun).

"I'd stepped completely into the Roman era, back when London was Londinium, the necropolis for the Romano-Celtic dead." The Doctor shrugged lightly; his wrinkled face was twisted in an odd way. "I didn't realize that at first, but the cold was a clue. Winters were a job back then and the Thames was a _lot_ smaller." The Doctor slowly picked up the mug, but he rests its weight on his bony leg, gathering his strength before he pulls it to his lips. "Profoundly one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. And I was terrified quite a lot in those days. Rabbity."

"How could it be Roman if there were bones? They burned their dead." Tish spoke with the finality of the educated youth. "How could that happen?" she persisted. "I used to read up on unexplained phenomenon, but...well, even the Crop Circles were explained by science. I never heard of walking into a past event in London."

"Those events tend to be very one-way." The Doctor told her grimly. "Especially when you walk into a den like I did." She paled. "Yes. Well." He took another slow drink of soup. "I never did find out who engineered that...like I said, it was clever. It was a natural phenomenon, but it was tweaked by some other agency. An alien mind. I remember brushing against it just a bit. Very odd...very...cold." He took one last swallow and thought hard. "Hungry." He said at last. "It was hungry, whatever it was."

"Hungry for...you?" Tish looked like she didn't want to ask that question at all, but she'd hate herself for not doing it.

"Oh, yes." The Doctor said quietly. "It was hungry for me."

"How did you get away?"

"I panicked. It saved my life. I followed the time-eddy on instinct and it led me straight out of the tunnel and onto the frozen ice of the Thames. Whatever was in the tunnel was chasing after me; I heard its claws. I fell right out of the culvert and onto a solid sheet of ice; skidded a good twenty metres on my chest..." He grimaced and rubbed at his ribs in an old memory. "That ice was filthy," he said in wonder. "Gives whole new meaning to the phrase, 'black ice,' you know? But whatever it was, it couldn't come outside. Maybe it couldn't walk in sunlight. I didn't have time to ask it questions, I just got to my feet and kept running, kept following that time-eddy. There was no warning at all; all of a sudden the ice was gone and I was back in summery old London-" The Doctor made a splashing sound with his lips. "It was cleaner back in the 1960's. I'll give it that, but it was still filthy. Visibility was worse than Loch Ness. I'll never go swimming there again."

He suddenly snorted. "The Brigadier was absolutely furious with me." He finished. "Maybe someday he'll explain why."

_Maybe sooner than you think, Doctor._ The Master smiles to himself. It's October. Christmas will be here before one knows it...

He watches absently, as Tish puts a third cup of miso into the Doctor, and her parents finish cleaning the Viewing Office. His thoughts are wandering again. Boredom will do that; he's never been lazy and this inactivity is perilously close to being idle. Soon the Doctor's beloved Earth will be ready for invading, and oh, how it will gall the Doctor that his pets are such participants in death and destruction.

It will gall him; it will hurt him.

The Master hopes this will _finally_ break him.

He needs to break the Doctor, because fair is fair and he owes the Doctor this. He must. The Doctor broke him, and more than once. Each battle they endured, each defeat he suffered at the Doctor's hands was still not a complete defeat if he could reap some small victory from his opponent.

He flips back to the original coding, and his deep, dark eyes sink into the image before him. He remembers when that brittle old man was young and healthy, flush with the arrogance of youth and military confidence. A part of the Master still can't believe the Doctor humiliated himself to ally with that human and his beloved UNIT.

At least he had the satisfaction of disbanding UNIT and sending each UNITeer into the death-camps. He particularly liked showing the Brigadier the films of his proteges as they died making weapons of death and destruction. Radiation poisoning was always a dramatic way to leave one's body.

A pity the Brigadier hadn't been as satisfying an audience.

* * *

"_Just out of curiosity," the old man said in a voice of stone, "would begging for their lives spare them, or would you prefer some other form of humiliation on my part?"_

"_Ooh, that's a nice one!" The Master clapped. "Well done! But to answer your question...no, I'm afraid not." He affected a sad voice and sad expression as he patted the old man's shoulder. "But I'll give you credit for cutting through the nonsense and getting to the real question. How about a nice cup of tea to go with your bread and water?"_

_The Brigadier looked at him with a face to match his voice. It was a face that almost stopped the Master for a moment, for it was a look he'd seen on the Doctor in his nightmares._

_It was the look that said, "You cannot touch me."_

_Then the Brigadier looked away, as if his eyes were unable to stand the sullying sensation of looking at the Master any further._

_The Master's face drew tight. "Toclafane," he said into the intercom, "Kill UNIT."_

_The Brigadier watched the entire thing and never turned a hair. His face never changed. The Master watched _him_ the whole time (the executions were taped so he could watch them any time). But through it all, the Brigadier never moved._

_And when it was over, he silently hobbled to his new prison, leaving the Master still steaming in his own rage that the Brigadier never responded._

"_The Doctor would have said something, Brigadier!" He shouted after the old man._

_The Brigadier never halted his crippled walk to his fate._

"_Well, Brigadier? Have you nothing to say?"_

_The Brigadier paused, his posture swaying for he was unsteady without his cane, and needed to tolerate the touch of the guards to get around. Carefully, he turned around and his face was still dry of tears._

"_Would the Prime Minister like me to say something?"_

_The Master snarled. "Are you a coward after all?"_

"_If I ever gave you that impression, that was not my intention. Not at all. Merely unimpressed with death. It happens." The Brigadier's voice never reflected anything more than a tired, simple fact. "I am human, and an old one at that. My wife is dead and you are killing my world for no more reason than that you can."_

"_And I should have left your men alive. Just to watch you beg for them." The Master can't remember being this angry since...since he last fought the Doctor._

_"They were already dying, Saxon. But you just killed them all so their lives are no longer toys at your whim." _

_The Master's eyes grew wide, unbelieving, but the glint was unmistakably there in those old brown eyes. "Oh," he breathed. "Well played, Sir Alistair. Well played indeed. Worthy of Alexander himself."_

"_Hmn." The Brigadier was remote again, but they both knew he had won. UNIT was dead; his life gone and the Master was bored with threatening good behavior with generic lives. It was so dull to hold up random hostages for good behavior compared to the thrill of pitting friends against friends, family against family._

"_You think you'll join them? Not for a long time, Sir Alistair. Not for a very long time."_

"_Time will tell. It always does, doesn't it?"_

"Yes it does." The Master whispered. And by this time tomorrow, the Brigadier would understand what it meant to live past one's natural lifespan.

Angry at his memories, the Master made a short day of it, ignored everyone, screamed at Lucy until she went into hiding, and blew up a few buildings with some of the newer solarifles. It wasn't the cure for his mood, but it was diverting. Then it was the usual getting-on-the-intranet-and-scaring-surviving-Eart hers. That took up his usual three hours and when he was finished he jumped back into his project plans. Nothing like concentrating on utter mayhem to get your attention off things.

* * *

When dawn rose over London, it was to the end of the snowstorm. The Toclafane would like that. He made a mental list of things they could destroy—and scowled at a small alarm chiming on his phone.

"What?" He snapped.

"**Sir,"** The Antarctic Warden's voice quivered like custard in an earthquake. **"Sir, there's been a breach in security."** In the background the sirens were screaming.

"Shut it, you fool! Did you think to secure the channel?" Just for having to ask, the Master should kill him.

"**Sir, yes, sir. Completely scrambled."**

"Right, then. What's the security breach?"

"**We don't have the full reports yet, but prisoner #10-4-5 escaped."**

The Master felt his body, independent of his mind, grow completely still.

"He what."

"**He's gone, sir. Without authorisation. The cameras are out and the database is wiped."**

"When was the last time you saw the Brigadier, you fool?" The Master kept his voice calm and soothing. Future corpses weren't helpful with intelligence when they were gibbering slabs.

"**I saw him personally back to his cell after his treatment; right on schedule, 2304 hours."**

"Did he complete his treatment?"

"**Yes, sir. I apologize if the report didn't reach you. The weather-"**

The Master glanced to the computer. There it was. "Never mind about the report for now." He'd read it later. "What was his status when he finished the procedure?"

"**As projected, sir."**

"Do I _have_ to tell you that when you post his WANTED posters all over the globe, you need to use UNIT's old images from the 1960's?"

"**Sir, no, but our UNIT databases on our side were wiped too."**

The Master closed his eyes. This was starting to sound terribly familiar. "How were they wiped, you fool?" He asked patiently.

"**We don't know sir. There was a magnetic atmospheric storm all night and-"**

Magnetic storm?

The Master flicked on the Main camera, and was assured to see the Doctor was still in his usual spot. More than that, the Master could feel him, Time Lord to Time Lord. Whoever the mad genius was who broke the Brigadier out of his prison wasn't the Doctor.

Or was he?

"Was anyone out of place seen at the base within the past 36 hours, Warden?"

"**Sir, I personally saw no one; I'll have to ask the checkpoint guards. There was a supply-hover just before the storm.**"

The Master waited with the patience of a glacier, but it must be confessed, his hearts were beating a little bit more as the Warden's whining rose and fell with the sirens.

"**Sir, we have a report; Sgt. Hawkins was on break in the mess hall when they brought the new prisoners in for their first rations. He thought there was something peculiar about one of themn...he wasn't in prison uniform and he was told he'd been 'grabbed up too fast for the usual processing.'"**

Well, that did happen... "Did he give a likeness?"

"**Better than that, sir. He sketched a good likeness of him. I'm sending the attachment right now."**

"Good. What was the prisoner's name?"

"**Dr. John Smith, Sir. He had an old library card on him for an ID; pre-Saxon: Address 76 Totter's Lane, Shoreditch, London."**

"You. Don't. Say."

_Ping_. The attachment came through.

The Master's thumb slipped over the slick pad, but he finally opened the file.

For a long time, the Master simply regarded the sketch. It was well done, he had to admit. This was a very familiar face and designed for caricature and exaggeration but the sergeant had looked beyond that to the actual features. The face was smiling, which probably got the guard's attention in the first place. People didn't _smile_ when they were sent off to slave labor in Siberia's Siberia. That particular Doctor was a consummate actor, but he couldn't hold a smile in any more than the Master could nail freon to a tree.

He looked old, the Master thought. He didn't have regenerative memory loss, but he did recall that the Time Lords had forced him to change out of that face when he was still young. Was it a clone? A cloned Time Lord could explain why he didn't feel the appropriate shifts in the temporal timestream.

But that only begged the question as to who would be desperate enough to clone _that_ particular model of the Doctor.

"Stand by to receive a better likeness," he said carefully, his mind racing. "The Brigadier is to be found and returned at all costs. This second fellow, Smith...have him posted as an Enemy of the World. Shoot to kill, shoot on sight.

"But not," he said icily, "if it means killing the Brigadier. Alive at all costs, you idiot. Do I make myself clear?"

"**Sir! Yes, sir!"**

The Master coldly disconnected, made a mental note to have the fool executed after this was over, and went to his personal database. It took a few minutes. [Doctor+Cybermen+London+196CE+] gave him a useful close-up...

"Hmn, that will do," he muttered to himself, wondering who this Isobel Watkins photographer was2. The Doctor had always hated the capture of his likeness, but he was clearly posing for her. The Master shook his head at the incongruous sight of the wild-haired little man in his ill-fitting clothes, sitting on the side of a street curb while behind him, the backs of UNIT and the Brigadier reduced a Cyberman to a cloud of single-minded electronic dust and plastic. Normally that Doctor wouldn't turn his back on anything cybernetic; his hatred of the mechanical men bordered on psychosis.

Image loaded; images sent across the world. He also included a search for the Doctor's TARDIS, making it sound as though it were a pirated copy of the one he kept onship. The Archangel Network hadn't detected anything like a stray Temporal stream. Ergo, it was most likely a clone. Clones might have the cleverness of their parents, but they were short-lived and the longer they thought for themselves the greater their chance of diverging and making mistakes.

"Pity." He said softly, wistfully. He would have liked to see a clone of Doctor Three. Would have kept _him_, to be honest. Just for the sake of old times and the occasional fencing match. But the Master wasn't stupid. It would be quite stupid to collect the only model of the Doctor that was crazier than himself.

1Is this a tribute to Ben and Polly? Gosh, whatever gave you that idea?

2The Invasion


	11. The Eleventh Hour

Gallifreyans are Outsiders, Shobogans, Colonists, and not a few of the remaining remnants of the superstitious Karn. Very few Gallifreyans are Time Lords—the tip of the pyramid. Or...the tip of the iceberg-the iceberg that sank the TITANIC.

To be a Time Lord is to be one of the only Gallifreyans in power; the Elite; to be so far above and beyond the other Gallifreyans that they are considered another species all their own. Time Lords are not like the Outsiders, eschewing all but the meanest technology, or the Karn, living only in the Mystic Paths, or the Shobogans, the failed angry students who spend their lives in dissolute rebellions, good for the occasional upheaval and political outrage (their deposition of the High Council after the Scandal of Ravolox was a fluke).

Time Lords control Time, and Time is the only coin that matters on Gallifrey.

To not be a Time Lord is to surrender one's fate to the hands of others and to be beholden to the questionable patronage of others.

The Doctor couldn't bear to not be a Time Lord—it was what everyone tried to do unless they were born in the Wastelands. He wanted to see the worlds past theirs, pass through the barriers of time and space, experience all of the amazing things within life. So he suffered through the centuries of schooling and brain buffing and the countless alterations that make a Time Lord's mind so different from Gallifreyan minds. _Work hard, _they were all advised. _Once a Time Lord, always a Time Lord. When you regenerate, you'll be a Time Lord again—but if you don't make it through the Academy, you won't be more than a Gallifreyan, and if you really fail you'll be a Shobogan in the Low Town. _

He became a Time Lord. A caste known for its remoteness of feeling and impartiality of emotions; of duty and law and precious little ethics. But it also made him part of something amazing, incredible, and intoxicating all at once.

Time Lords-the most powerful beings in the Universe all shared a sameness of the mind; it let them sense the others of their own kind no matter where they were in the Universe-Individuals and occasional rouges notwithstanding.

Naturally, they let the overweening responsibility of their position go straight to their heads—those oversized brains did have the capacity for plenty of those flaws.

Time Lords, unlike the other members of Gallifrey, are physically engineered so they can live utterly alone, without assistance or support.

Of all the sick cosmic jokes out there, this is probably up there with the best and the brightest—like Omega's second accidental death creating a new starbody; that grade of best, brightest and sickest.

The physical superiority that wires them is mostly from their constant exposure to Time. The rest is their own handicrafting as they shape and re-shape their bodies to suit an ever-refining concept of what a Time Lord is supposed to be. They take themselves very seriously.

Did take themselves very seriously.

Mentally and emotionally, being alone was worse for them than it was most other species in the Galaxies. Omega went mad fairly quickly in his isolation after only a few hundred years, and he wasn't alone in that example. No one really knows why; being one of the first races might have something to do with it. Or perhaps its their Temporal Awareness—aloneness is an aberration.

Part of the problem—a big part—of being alone for the Doctor is he's spent so much time living in the forward that he doesn't do very well when he's looking backwards over his shoulder. But when one is falling off a cliff, they're going to try to grab something on the way down. And the Doctor does something no other Doctor has ever done.

He cashes in his reward chips and says goodbye to all his Companions.

This not just a giant leap backwards, it is a grinding, wrenching ache and pain, a vigil that has never properly been paid suit. In many ways, it is terribly, terribly long overdue but he is the first Doctor to actually explore the depths of his loneliness and depression. It's the first time such a Vigil has even been possible. The last example could have been when his Third self wandered lost in the Vortex, dying from his own overdose of rads from Metabilis III, but no one, not even Four, remembers how he managed to stagger back to UNIT and die in the arms of the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith.

He shakes hands with Stephen Taylor, glad to see his efforts to heal his adopted planet are successful.

He smiles at Dodo's firstborn daughter, Anne, but can't get close of course—radiation. He sees the baby's thread of Time and it's a good one, so he tells her mother something of her future—but to please keep her away from Waterbeer Street and French politics. Dodo smiles and agrees to humor him. The Doctor is relieved.

Ian and Barbara are difficult to track; they are living quietly because someone noticed they stopped aging a few decades ago, but the TARDIS remembers their signature auras and they are glad to see him for those few seconds.

He tells Trolius he's happy to see him, and he's very glad he loves Vicki, because he'd really hate to kill him.

Some of the visits are pure agony. Not all of the Companions survived, and not all came to good ends. But they're long, long overdue and who better to pay a debt than a dying man?

It's Jamie and Zoe that confuse him the most, because he remembers how much they loved him. So he saves it for the last. He'll look up Polly and Ben first; Victoria too.

The TARDIS knows what he wants...what he needs. And she helps him. Together they sift through centuries, and planets, and decades and even weeks and days and minutes, finding the right moment to not just say goodbye, but to help at the same time.

And with each visit, the TARDIS protests just a little bit more.

He can feel her distress; if she had hearts they would be fluttering in Gallifreyan Morse, communicating to him that he needed to stop what he was doing and listen to her; to stop in front of the Console and let the rightful events turn.

There's a part of him that wants to do just this—oh, he _wants_ it, even as the rest of him wants to run as hard and fast as he can in the other direction.

But he's also quite, quite scared. He remembers bits and pieces of regenerating into his Fourth. His poor Third Self was lost, too weak to properly pilot and in pain, trying to steer and failing even as his mind and body betrayed him. Radiation normally doesn't affect Time Lords—thus it scares them when it turns fatal.

It scares them like few other things can—like vampires.

So he keeps going. And he is beginning to grit his teeth and blink back sporadic bouts of tears and erratic heartsbeats. Twice he blanks out, but the TARDIS marshalls up just enough energy each time to bring him back to himself. But he keeps going. If he doesn't finish this, who will? He doesn't want his future selves to feel what he's feeling.

In his self-imposed Vigil, he starts to remember things. Liz Shaw's smirk when she knew he was right, and how it made her look so vibrantly _alive_; Benton's easygoing patience that enforced his quiet strength. The Brigadier's tiny quirk of the chin and Yate's sometimes horridly honest speech. And in seeing his old Companions, he starts to remember bits and pieces of the himselves he was...he sees him in their eyes.

He's forgotten a lot, he realizes with not a little embarrassment.

All of his current life, he thought his First Self acted grouchy because he thought he was supposed to. He's forgotten until now, talking with Dodo and Stephen, what it meant to be so old in the first place, so worn out. His memory had begun to falter; his bones ached and pained him with degenerative diseases—pifling and trifling matters to cure on Gallifrey, but he couldn't exactly go back there for treatment, could he eh? He doesn't remember that at the time he regenerated he was missing about half his teeth and when he did regenerate he didn't care that one tooth wound up black in the front—he was just glad to have a tooth there again!

He forgot so many things, but that was not just a problem with being a long-lived being. It was also part of being the Doctor.

If seeing his Companions could be agony, then seeing himself in the reflection of their minds and memories was a different color of suffering.

But he sees it through. He goes through them all, and he re-lives himself in the doing.

He must.

And finally...

It's almost over.

Ten is the number of the _Kleidoukos, _the Custody of others. It is the number of Atlas._  
_

* * *

The TARDIS lands in one of the outer isles of Scotland in the crisp of winter's end. It's snowing as it was when he greeted Rose at the New Year, but this is before the New Year; this is the Year's Death.

Ben and Polly are in Scotland at a bonfire.

The King was dying for the year.

The Doctor is amazed at how fitting this is. He's almost done. All he has to do after this is...Victoria and Jamie and Zoe.

Snow spirals down and orange sparks flow up in a reverse waterfall of fire and air. The Doctor's hyper-stretched senses are battered at the sensory overload; the wood is all driftwood collected and dried from the ocean. This is a new festival for him; it isn't Up Helly A or the usual bonfires of his Earth experience...its wild and old. The seawater has stripped the wood bare of essentials and left behind salts-impregnated cores. Smooth and shiny and hard the driftwood takes on forms like fantastic polished bones...how apropos. Bonfire meant "bonefire" in the old days, when sacrifices were a matter of course.

There must be hundreds of people on this sandy little promentory, dancing wheels in the soft grey sand less than fifty yards from the sigh of the sea, playing music of every possible origin and bagpipes—simply lots and lots of bagpipes. Chaunters, drums, bells, and enough fiddles to orchestrate an Irish wedding.

He finds himself looking for Polly's glowing yellow hair, but it's glowing silver now—still gorgeous—and her smaller husband Ben is spinning her in a circle with his strong hands. His Admiral's uniform is splendid and suits the strength he's grown into. His beard is neat and trim and the same silver as Polly's hair. They swirl through the dancers, half of them clothed in fantastic costumes. Children tumble about them, Asian and Eurasian and half of them are dressed as little monks and nuns. The Doctor remembers learning they were operating an orphanage in India...for some reason they're here, and they have clearly taken their obligations with them.

For a long moment the Doctor just stares at them, amazed and delighted. They are a beautiful couple together. He hadn't visited them till now...he couldn't bear to tell them about Jamie when they asked; they had been so fond of the boy...

"Oh, my giddy aunt!"

The Doctor thought he was finished with impossible things at this stage of his life.

The tired Time Lord slowly turns his head. A much-smaller man is standing by the stack of firewood, an armload of long branches in his arms. The recorder he had been playing is tucked into his cumberbund.

The Doctor sees himself but barely recognizes him. He's older, for starters. Much older than he remembers being when the Time Lords changed his face. He's wearing a pale blue shirt with long puffed sleeves and red braces with Tartan trousers the same color of the Atlantic at dusk. His tie is for once, dark green instead of blue.

But that battered old frock coat...that hasn't changed at all. The Doctor's dazed mind latches on that coat, suddenly caught in a swirl of memories. He'd _really_ liked that coat.

"What are you doing here?" His Second Self hisses at him, his small green eyes turned large and green with indignation. "It's not your time!"

"I was saying good-bye," The Doctor shoots back. He's so tired by now, that he isn't sure he's making sense. Keeping the lindos at bay is increasingly difficult because it requires more and more effort from his brain to focus. "Is this...I was...saying goodbye..." He stares confused over the crowd. "Looking for Ben and Polly before I see...Victoria...and Jamie."

His little self drops the wood back on the pile and hurries forward. With one touch of his small hands on the Doctor's shoulders he understands what it all means in a trice. The Doctor is embarrassed. One doesn't like to meet one's past just as they're about to become a chapter of it—he expects to be scolded for being careless in his body.

His little self shakes his head, makes a tutting sound and snaps his head backwards. "Ben, Polly, Victoria?"

Victoria?

But Victoria is here, and she's stepping through the throng with the others. She's older and as lovely as Polly with her soft dark hair half-pinned up. She is, amazingly, wearing a professional businesswoman's suit in this wild setting and she's utterly unself-conscious about it.

Considering who she traveled with, that's really not surprising.

_Oh, Very funny._ His younger self thinks at him. Despite his shabby, frumpy appearance, his mind is cool and clean. _A suit and tie with trainers? Allow me to salute you for being such a mishmash. At least my wardrobe is consistent._

_Consistent is one of the words for it. Did the Temporal Web Committee ever charge you for interfering with History for that?_

_I had nothing to do with Charlie Chaplin, you pretentious nitwit. Great Minds do think alike..._

"Doctor?" Ben is asking. "What is it?" They stare at "their" Doctor, and then at him. Polly's eyes grow wide a second before Victoria's. Humans. Polly was the first one to recognize him in his new body, and Victoria's mind was strengthened from long exposure to the Great Intelligence, but he's still surprised.

"My newest model, I believe." His older model supplies wryly. "I'm afraid he's been in a pickle."

"You don't look well, Doctor." Polly reaches up to touch his arms, Ben giving her space. "Where's Jamie and Zoe?"

"I..." The Doctor stammers. They thought Jamie was with him? Zoe? They knew about Zoe? Zoe was here?

"We're right here."

The Doctor freezes, his hearts lumping together in a mass of tissue and locked-up muscle. His eyes frog out of his face as he takes in the visage of one of the Pipers in the crowd, slinging his pipes over his shoulder as he walks forward. A tiny woman is walking at his side, and despite the fact that her hair is grey not brown, it is Zoe.

_Didn't call for him...because...didn't have to. No matter where Jamie was, it was always close to me. Always._

The Piper has aged in this impossibly modern time. And he is, like Ben and Polly and Victoria and Zoe, fantastically handsome. The TARDIS carries its stamp on them even now; a slight otherworldliness that adds to their inner selves and makes them more real and multi-dimensional. They've been changed forever from their exposure to the timeship.

Zoe and Victoria and Jamie confuse him terribly; they all three feel of space travel, and solar winds and Vortex ions. Why would Victoria have that aura?

The Doctor remembers an old fear involving Jamie; Jamie is always watching him; always worried about him...

_Jamie's not the one you should worry about! _ The little man scolds him in his mind.

The Doctor is shaken and confused and he's starting to lose this battle.

The small man stares up at him, his careworn face tired. "Hold on, you bungling fool," he scolds, and reaches up to put his small hands on his newer self's shoulders. The Doctor stares down at them and thinks, ridiculously, _They're small hands._

"Such importance to being tall." The little man sniffed. "You're in one of the Soft Places of Time, you. I suppose it could be worse...I could be back in the Old Console Room again..."

It is a scrap of comfort to know he's learned something new through the lives.

"Oh, shush it and come here." The little Hobo says through his teeth; it's not a voice that can be argued against, and pulls him into his arms, clenching his eyes shut with the effort of giving him physical strength. The Doctor wants to protest; the newer Doctors should be protecting their predecessors, but that's a battle they usual lose.

And when it comes to the first three of himselves, no Doctor ever dared to tell them not to take risks on behalf of their futures; they were all stubborn about that.

"Doctor?" Jamie blinks curiously and in the fire he looks far older than he should.

"It's all right, Jamie." The little man says quickly, but keeps his hand on the other. "You know him, Jamie. This is me from a future time...a future life." A deep breath. "He's getting ready to move to his newest body, and...he wanted to say good-bye."

"Oh, my." They're all standing close, Ben and Polly and Victoria...Polly leads the way and flings her arms about him and he has no choice but to return the embrace, sinking into the honest human warmth. Zoe latches on from the other side, and she's so tiny next to the others, her hair smells like the circulated air of a space station somewhere...and...why does she feel like she's been around the energies coming off a black hole?

Ben follows suit, and Ben is _small_, smaller than even his Seventh, but the _power_ of the soul in that body is a giant's. Shy and sweet, the older Victoria steps across in her loosened office suit and tips up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. She smells like her original era still; a hint of soot and steam and cinders is a part of her aether, though she is now very much a child of the modern era and its whisper of new ions, petrol, digital plastics and wires. Nepal has soaked into her genes, put the distant ring of bells and murmured prayers in the background of her mind.

Only Jamie holds back. His hair as beautifully white as the Doctor's, only the warm color of sweet cream as opposed to his little self's cool, metallic tints. His soft locks frame a deeply tanned face gone round with the strength of age. His eyes glow the color of sunlit gentians and he's gained _muscle_. Those glowing eyes are troubled and forlorn and it hurts the Doctor to see the Companion he loved so well stay out of the circle.

"It's all right, Jamie." His small self murmurs. "It's all right."

And Jamie passes the little Hobo one last look; the Doctor realizes in this strange in-between moment that Jamie wanted to greet him all along, but he was worried about hurting the younger Doctor. With permission given, the Piper did not hesitate. He took his turn and flung his arms about the much-taller man, grinning from ear to ear. He feels like Jamie. Oh, his body remembered and missed this touch, this unashamed love of contact and affection. Rose hugged him like this, in his last and this body.

"My word, you've grown," the Doctor whispers faintly as he stares down into that strong, square face. "How you've grown."

"Aye, it happens." Jamie blinked back tears. "What's happening to ye? Why are ye dying?"

The Doctor is shocked but no one else is surprised.

"I'm not the only one who changes with Time," his younger self murmurs. "Jamie's become quite the Adept." His Lungbarrow green eyes are warm with affection. "And because we're in one of the Soft Places...it brings it out in him even more."

"I can't explain, there's not enough time...I just...wanted to say good-bye." The Doctor stammers, wants to babble, but the weariness is piling up in his brain, his body, his soul.

"It's all right. If you'll excuse us, everyone, I need to see to me for a moment...make sure I get back to the TARDIS in one piece before a Paradox happens..." His younger self grabs him by the arm and gives them all an anxious look. "Everyone please, continue on and act normal because if we don't...well, we don't know who's watching."

They obey with alarming alacrity. This clues the Doctor in that this strange time he's encountered has lots of things going on in it that he either doesn't know about...or had to forget.

His younger self slowly frog-marches him across the sands; the glow of the bonfire cools against the swirl of snow but the firelight reflected on the flakes is starting to affect the edges of his vision; he wobbles a bit and his trainers fill with sand.

"What are you doing?" The Doctor wonders.

His old self sniffs loudly and looks up at him. "A pity I don't get smarter with age. I was hoping..." The still-black brows lifted up into the glowing silver hair. "You aren't the only one who ever took a leave of absence to say good-bye, you know. Though I wouldn't put it off as long as _you_ are." The green eyes are sharp with disapproval. "You're putting your future self at risk—and the TARDIS too!"

"I had to say goodbye," The Doctor tells his younger self.

"So you did." With a tsk and a tut, he was escorted over the sands to the TARDIS. "Goodness," his smaller self is surprised and runs his palm across the smooth blue panels. "Spruced her up, did you? Not bad. I can't seem to get her out of the '1960's and that means she always looks like a bad paint job."

"She's beautiful," The Doctor murmurs.

"Always." The craggy, careworn face goes soft for a moment; his face is meant for change. The sea winds pick up; ruffling the silver mane.

"I don't remember having white hair until I was working for UNIT." The Doctor blurted.

"I'm not surprised. There's been a lot of memory loss...I had to jettison a lot of rooms-" The small hand rapped on the side of his own head, a knock-wood move. "Doubt you needed all of that anyway." He blinks in surprise. "Coral? Really?" He stares. "Feeling a bit organic in our old age?" He sounds impressed as hell about it. "I'm impressed."

The Doctor doesn't know how this little version knows what the inside of _his_ TARDIS looks like, or how he's more interested in staying on his feet than asking questions just now. His knees are weak. The sand seems to shift and move up his spine and he stumbles. The small body leaned up, catching him. "Jamie!" He called. "I know you're there!"

"I'm always there." The Scot was at his side in a blink, holding him up. "It's all right, Doctor," he rolled in a burr. "We'll get ye home."

Head spinning and buzzing from the rise of Artron, the Doctor leaned into their arms, letting their strength carry him over the threshold. For once, he can let someone really help him. Strength pours through his body, a temporary aid, and he recalls being the Cricketeer, and their Original Self doing the same thing to help him recover his being. He'd forgotten about this until now; good thing Two hasn't forgotten, but why he can remember Future Events he doesn't know...

_I told you, you Haystack-for-a-Head. We're in one of the Soft Places!_ Two scolds him with all the avuncular bite of an uncle. _Past, Present, Future...it's all just where your face is turned over here._

_The Soft Places were destroyed with the Time Lords._

_The ones they knew about, you mean..? _Two's mind-voice is wickedly innocent, that way he had when he was "accidentally" destroying computers or sabotaging harmful equipment.

Jamie pulls him into one last hug. "Take care of yourself," He warns. "I'm no longer there to keep an eye on ye." His grip squeezes hard. "Not yet, anyway."

The Doctor wants to know what that riddle means, but. There's no time; he takes a deep breath and stands on his own power, and the doors shut anxiously after him, cutting him off from the two pairs of helping hands. His eyes are starting to burn. He blinks rapidly and the TARDIS spins through space.

In the back of his mind, a part of him is still on the coast. He can see it play like a film and he understands instinctively that a piece of Soft Time has followed him into the TARDIS, creating a tunnel connecting his awareness between his past and his looming Future, which, unfortunately, is manifesting as a rumbling, building tidal wave of a bone-shaking positronic groaning of profane chips and telepathic circuits.

* * *

The Scot and the little Time Lord watched the empty space where the TARDIS de-materialized into the darkness. Silver water and snowflake surf foamed at their feet.

"Doctor," the Piper murmured. "He didn't really seem tae know ye."

"Most of them have forgotten me, Jamie. I told you that before."

"Och. Tis a pity." The little Highlander rested his hand on his shoulder. "Does that mean they'll always forget you?"

"They'll never _completely_ forget me, Jamie. Just most of me." The white-haired man tilted his head up to the much-younger man. "My Third Self remembered all of me at the end, I told you."

"Aye, but he was in a lot of pain, you told me that too."

"It's a bit like reincarnation with you humans. If they _want_ to remember, they _probably_ will. It takes time and effort and an expert in past-personality exploration to unlock those memories." The little Time Lord put his hands in his pockets, his worn face creased with thought. "Really, though, it's not a good idea to spend too much time in the past. It's just as well that Time Lords aren't always the sort to look inside themselves, and I'm afraid I'll get out of the habit of doing that a long time ago." His absent mangling of tenses no longer makes the Piper wince.

The two settle into the soft sand of the dunes. Behind them the crackles of the bonfire and cheerful laughing rippled at the edges of their hearing, but the cool soft dark of the sussurating Atlantic suited the contemplative mood they both wore. The TARDIS of the future had long gone, but the Piper sensed his old friend felt lingering traces of it...and of its occupant. He kept silent, listening.

"Time Lords prefer to stay in the same old static patterns of contemplation and repetition. That's what _real_ Time Lords do. So few of us look _forward_ with life...once I got into the habit of looking forward instead of backward it was hard to remember to ever look back." The little man sighed and closed his eyes. His head dropped forward in deep concentration, much like he had on the planet of the War Games when in sending the message-cube to his people. "And I thought old Double-oh-Dandy was stiffnecked!" He said in wonder. _"Come on, you scrawny scarecrow,"_ he muttered, concentrating. _ "You can do it. You managed to luck your way this far...just a little longer..."_

* * *

The TARDIS hears his past self, and responds. She does something and eases off the high-pitched screams coming off the walls, shunting the causes to other rooms, diverting the strain elsewhere. It's not going to last; its a delaying technique nothing more. The longer the Regeneration comes the harder it will be when it does come. The Doctor is moving underwater-slow across the Console Room, the overarching corals casting weak shadows over his face. He's utterly wiped out. He'd made a mistake going this long. So many Companions...

But he had to. He had to see them again. He wanted to remember the reason why he hated to be alone.

_I'm going to die alone. I'm going to regenerate alone, just like Eight..._The panic sends his hearts beating fast, rising up his throat.

_Buck up, lad_, Two's voice is strong and clean, slicing through the hot itchy static in his brain like cool sweet water. _You can do it. Expel the extra Artronic energy—it's just like radiation and you ought to know how to do __that__._

_What are you doing here?_ The Doctor asks in his mind. Less than a second has passed since he stepped through the TARDIS door, but in the Universe of the brain, a century might have passed.

_Making sure you don't make a complete fool of yourself, of course._ The clean, cool mind-voice was just a little sardonic. _Quit fussing. _ _You got us into this mess, so we'll have to get you out of it._

He wasn't going to die alone, then. He's still just utterly terrified, and his mind can't latch on to the good things for long. He tries to recall the things he loved about life, but it only reminds him of what he's leaving.

_You're not alone. You have Her. _

"_I don't want to go,"_ The Doctor whispers.

_Neither did I_, Two whispers, and the mind-voice is fond and gentle. Even with the Artronic energy building up, the whisper is enough to shock him because this isn't a memory talking, or an upwelling of his past personality leaking through his personal Timestream; it's Two's actual voice from the past, bleeding through into the present.

_How is this possible? How can you remember your dying when it hasn't happened for you yet?_

_Travel as much as I do, and you'd be surprised._ The answer is evasive; protective. Ten picks up on this and questions it, and Two sighs, his mind "rolling his eyes upward" in impression. _Oh, fine. The CIA made me remember my future death when they were punishing me. Goth especially thought that was effective. That idiot. Sorry you asked now?_

_I don't know?_ Ten's brain reeled. _You kept us from remembering that. Why?_

_You're the future, you starveling in a suit. You didn't need my baggage...looks like you picked up enough of that from the other pasts... _A definite sigh of exasperation._ Did you never think to seek out and sense your own presence in the Universe? As much travelling as we do out there, couldn't you ever sense yourself? It's no different from seeking out the other minds of other Time Lords!_

Ten is abashed to think that he never had; all of his grief stemmed from being alone, being the Last of the Time Lords.

_Oh, for goodness sakes._ Two is clearly out of sorts with him now. _No wonder Six calls you "The Oncoming Sulk." _If a mind could give the image of hitting itself against a brick wall, that would be what Two was doing right now. Y_ou have __no idea__ how close you came to waking Four up, do you? Or how many times you did it? _ (a mental headshake). _Oh, well, water under the Bifrost Arch..._

The Doctor doesn't know which is more alarming: that his past selves talk about him behind his back (all the times he talked about _them_ are suddenly and painfully ironic), or that he'd come close to rousing up the Sleeping Titan. The Titan wins by a thread. Four's power is _impossible_ to contain. If he ever woke, it would be at the cost of the current incarnation. It would take an emergency much more severe than a planet of dying Time Lords or a Dalek conquest of the Galaxies to justify that act.

_Calm, calm. You've got other things to worry about now._

The Doctor does calm; Two's doing something to tamp off his rising panic, one of those odd mental tricks he learned in his wanderings. He had been the true explorer of them all while the rest had been content in touristing. Two had retained their Original's ravenous hunger for knowledge and with his boundless new energy, he'd journeyed to learn; he'd absorbed responsible knowledge across the stars. The playful, childlike vagabond with the messy hair and clownish face had soaked up the most difficult and responsible layers of Tibet, mastered the art of astral travel for his future selves, spent decades in the company of the Mind Monks of Darren, picked up the martial arts from three worlds and acquired the questionable knack of Vortex Walking.

Ridiculously, the Doctor remembers now and only now that Two is why he has a fondness for light blue shirts and dark blue ties, a grinning habit of Tousled hair and a mad love of life.

And he remembers how much he'd fought when he was Two, screaming at the end, defiant as the Time Lords blackened and burned his face into darkness. He never gave up; and because he _didn't_ give up, much of his personality survived to carry into Three, despite the cold plans of the Time Lords who wanted to break him down and re-make him from the ground up.

Two is the number of audacity.

_Fighting is good, lad. Fighting is good._

Two reminds him of this as they both twist and twine into that memory of their reluctant regeneration, as he spiraled down to the oblivion of his forming body. Only as his mind spirals _down_, his Artron is spiraling _up_. _Up and up and up._ Ten screams from the power of it, grabbing for breath only to scream again and yes he's scared, but it's a LIVE scared; its exhilarating and intoxicating and an ecstacy of fear because there are no words for this; he'd forgotten this happened with Regenerations, how could he have forgotten, and he's on the edge of the greatest cliff in the Universe, poised to jump and he's mostly scared because he doesn't know the exact second he'll jump-

_Don't be scared—you'll be the one to jump. No one's going to push you._

-It flashes out of him with the force of a stellar storm; explodes through his pores and goes straight into the TARDIS.

The TARDIS, naturally, screams.

He has room for a fresh layer of guilt upon the other layers upon his hearts, and when she starts to break apart under the strain, he feels it correspond to the cells breaking apart and re-shaping inside his own body.

_Life depends on change..._

The Doctor has one last, tiniest glimpse of himself from the past in that moment. Just an attosecond of recollection of himself saying that to Ben and Polly.

But in the light of the Artronic firestorm, it's enough.

And the TARDIS is listening. And waiting. And watching. She's waited _a long time_ for another chance to try again. Always before, something has been in the way—The Time Lords forced his regeneration away from her upon the floor of the Council Hall; her Third and Fourth and Fifth Doctors partially regenerated outside the TARDIS, their minds and memories damaged from poison, or radiation, or physical impact. Her Sixth Doctor had been broken to the point she'd had to call for extra help to push him into Seven, who also died and regenerated outside of her walls. Her Eighth's mind had already been amnesiac; the Time War fallout had exacerbated his trauma...and Nine...

Nine had been a hero, focusing on giving his life for a brave young girl without showing a scrap of regret because he couldn't bear for her to wear that sort of guilt. He'd changed laughing on the way out, and laughed on his way in.

It's been a long time since this chance came to her.

She takes it.

Her Doctor isn't small this time; but he's clever, and his hair is a cheerful mess, echoing his bottomless potential for joy. His eyes stay just one color but that color is reflective, adding depth or tint according to his surroundings. His face is elastic and boyish—that's the same. It's mobile and rubbery and reflective of his thoughts and feelings but a face is only a mask—they never really tell the full depth of the thoughts beneath.

And just at that first moment in the TARDIS when they left Mondas, this Doctor's newly sculpted mind lets her in full-fledged and wholehearted.

He loves her.

The TARDIS is in a lot of pain at this point; he's being born and she's going through more than labor pains; there are definite birth complications. Too much energy built up—this is very different from that first true TARDIS-renewal. At the same time, every scrap of this rampaging energy is needed to effect this miracle. Otherwise she'd be forced to shrink down the Console room another 18cm in conversion.

This isn't nearly as quiet as her Doctor's first regeneration, and his connection with her won't be as psychically close, but it _will_ be just as effective.

She'll see to that.

If they survive. She gave everything to heal him; and now they're both falling back to Earth like a comet. He's shouting with joy, laughing as he hangs on to her controls, and it's his turn to save them now.

Ten is literally, the Lonely God number because it is the number of the circle; infinity with distance too vast to be fathomed.

Ten is the number of the Deca; the Broken Generation; he is not just the last of the Time Lords, he is the last Deca. The final number that put the books on the shelf and locked the door on his way out.

Eleven is the number of reconciliation, new beginnings, and the opposite side of the coin from Two.

Two is the number of Pandora's Box; the Trickster, the Mirror.

Eleven is a numerical facet of Two; the number One given twice.

Two is the Dyad, the not-yet-perfect multitude.

Eleven is a multitude.

Eleven is the Tower in the Tarot, the lightning-struck monolith under assault from forces engendered in their own past.

But Eleven is also the number to remind the ancients of something very important.

Eleven reminds the Cosmos that even the guilty can receive Favor from the gods;

the Eleventh Hour.

The Doctor takes the challenge as the Tower falls to Earth.

"GERONIMOOOOO!"


	12. Death is But a Door

Here it is...the Conclusion of it all, and a wild ride it is! (Until the new episodes and maybe I can add 12 to this). Thanks to everyone for sticking it out. The reviews meant everything because I was not sure of how it would come across!

But finally, at long last, an explanation that ties up some loose ends...and leaves the door open for future stories.

Because One is a Beginning and an Ending, but Two is the beginning From the Ending.

Death is but a Door.

* * *

In the Beginning:

Rassilon loves to win. He's won one of his life's most important goals in the final defeat of the Pythia. Gallifrey is now a planet ruled by Science, not Superstition, and thanks to Omega, they are now Lords of Time.

The glory of this fact has not withered at the loss of Omega, his Blood Brother. It has not changed against the following and newest worst news of his life. He does not look forward to what is about to happen, but he will not hesitate; he will not shirk one iota.

He paces back and forth across the stone dais, the heavy scroll of carved ivory-paper in his large hands. Betrayal is never a palatable sensation, but the proof is there. The third and last of the original Triumvirate chooses to avoid his company. Avoid his company in the wake of their other partner's death! Rassilon's jaw is clenched tight to the point of pain. This is bad enough in its own right; to implicate without words that he feels Rassilon the Great is responsible for Omega's death. But for the accusor to be the only other surviving member of the Triumvirate? A double betrayal there.

He will have to do something. He will have to be quick, and very careful. In this politically young atmosphere it would be too easy to make a martyr or an emblem, and their Little Blood Brother had always been the emblem of the people of Gallifrey. They had all, rich and poor, Plebian and Elite, adored him—but especially the Plebians, the coarse-born and the freed slaves.

Little Blood Brother, they called him. Omega and Rassilon had been Blood Brothers first before finding him. Ergo he had to be Little Blood Brother. He was smaller than they were by far, but he never minded; he laughed. He was always laughing about something...

But Little Blood Brother was not laughing now. No one was.

Little Blood Brother needs to be stopped before his contamination spreads across Gallifrey. It is good and convenient that he is busy now, giving comfort to Omega's grieving widow. Let him stay busy. It will take his attention off the here and now.

It will give Rassilon time to plan.

Eventually, a plan comes to the crafty Demigod.

* * *

**One Thousand Years Later:**

It is a beautiful puzzle, the Corycion.

It is a trap. A prison.

A riddle.

A poem of astonishing intricacy and cerebral loveliness. It can only be defeated if one solves the puzzles within. Rassilon himself chose questions for which there could be no easy answers—some were unanswerable without a great deal of time and effort. It isn't just mental puzzles—Death and Time, no! The puzzles reach from physical ability, to emotional ability, to mental acuity and all other possible tests. Through it all rests its sentient Guardian, a genetically loomed specimen of Rassilon's own design. He calls it, "The Falconer" in amused tribute of the old days. The Falconer is designed to be suspicious and obedient to Rassilon and it will gladly supervise as Warden to its special prisoner.

The Corycion rests in the heart of the Parnassus, and The Parnassus sits in the middle of the Catacumbae, deep in the bowels of the misty, marshy horrors of the Death Zone. It is a trap within a trap within a trap; one of Rassilon's most elegant and a pity no one else knows of its existence, but he devised it in the long, sleepless hours of his Foundry with none to witness his genius but the golden moon.

A special box awaiting its special contents.

Rassilon studies the little model on his desk, unable to stop admiring the work of his own hands. Only one thousand years in the making, but there is a sheer genius to the creativity borne of necessity. No other living eyes have even looked at this; when it is closed up it just looks like another model fitting under the Game of Rassilon. At last he gives the puzzle-box a final stroke and sets it deep inside the bottom of the Board of Rassilon's Game. He should destroy it, but his own pride cannot bear it. It is such a clever thing and he loves to be clever.

He is finally alone from all the well-wishers and hangers-on and the court players, politicians and welladays. The peace and quiet makes him breathe deep but if it were up to him, he wouldn't be alone right now. Omega would still be here with him, and Little Blood Brother.

But Omega has been dead for a thousand years, and Little Blood Brother behaves as though Rassilon is dead to him because of it! Rassilon's shoulders are set tight and strong. Midnight is the final hour for the breach between the surviving members of the Founding Triumvirate. The summons has been given. If Little Brother will not return to the Tower and take his place at Rassilon's side...then his absence will be recognised as an inexcusable act of rebellion.

Oh, if only Little Blood Brother could see reason! Discord cannot, must not be seen on Gallifrey! Not after they'd accomplished so much! The people need the morality of strength and ability. They must know that this rule will last forever. It has crushed the Warlords; defeated the Great Vampire War; witnessed the long-overdue destruction of the Pythia and their tight-fisted despotic rule upon the Kasterborous System with their mental powers and obfuscation of science.

Rassilon has fought very hard to win, and he has chosen to never, ever lose.

The young ruler tips his head up to look at the sky through the glasstic done. No one sees him but the moon, once revered Goddess of the night. She is a rich source of taranium ore, no longer the "Virgin Goddess" of old now that her wealth is plundered on an hourly basis. She is now _Pazithi Gallefreya_, a sister to the dustier, smaller sphere in the sky. Science has won; the Pythia have lost. Mysticism is officially proscribed and out of fashion. No moons are worshiped now; instead, the new supernova is hailed as a tribute to its creator, Omega.

Gallifreyans prefer cremation for their dead; Omega's supernova is a noble tombstone and Rassilon is content at the hidden layers of symbolism. First and foremost, it means that such sacrifices cannot be reversed. Gallifrey has moved forward and will never return to the dark days of ignorance. The price of Science cannot be overlooked. Omega's final act for Gallifrey has been celebrated in the streets for over 7,200,000 nycthemerons, and will easily last another thousand years. They mourn him; they all do. Omega's widow still weeps despite the help of Rassilon's money and Little Blood Brother's familial bond, but at least Omega's Hand no longer wanders in a fruitless attempt to find its master. Rassilon had to swallow his pride long enough to ask Little Blood Brother to thwart the thing and put it in a containment box. Rassilon tucked it away with both relief that the deed was done, and foreboding that of the Three Founders, he, Rassilon the Great, was the only one the Hand would not bide.

In the streets, a crowd of young men and women run with food and drink in their hands, faces flushed with giddy youth and pride of their planet's accomplishments. Before the Mastery of Time they were the ones protesting in the streets for the hundreds of factions tearing each other apart.

_Tomorrow the Borders of Gallifrey close. Tomorrow the lines between Gallifreyan and Time Lord open. The vacation of one thousand years is passed._

Amongst the festivities, the rejects of Time Lord Society are hastily packing, leaving what they cannot carry or pay to have shipped off. The Citadel only has room for its true Children of Time now. Anyone else will be put to death after the second sun rises. Aliens, diplomats, the Pythia's slaves, the beggars...all will be gone. Some cleansing has begun early if Rassilon is to believe the reports, but this is a small matter in a great moment. The Pythia were the first to leave, and Karn is large enough to hold them. Good Riddance, but they are still useful and their Elixirs will ensure that Rassilon will not allow any of their old enemies to come calling.

Rassilon the Great is smiling wistfully in the privacy of his own thoughts as he looks over the Citadel. Omega's sigils and personal flags are fluttering in the highest winds, on every building and tower in tribute to the power that will sustain them for millions of years to come. Through Omega's death they have all become eternal and immortal.

Immortal.

Rassilon likes the feel of that word on his tongue; on the tip of his mind. He does not like immortality for its own sake—that would be quite stupid. Being unable to die takes away the...to be blunt about it, the entire _meaning_ of life. Death is but a Door. He doesn't want to live forever—who in their right mind would? But now ...now they have the capacity to reach higher and further than ever before.

With immortality, the risks are simply more..._interesting_.

Rassilon likes things interesting.

The ruler walks back and forth in the silence of his private rooms. He keeps few possessions for himself, but what he does keep is multilayered in usefulness. His Coronet emphasizes his mental powers to the extent that no one can think against him if he so chooses it. Perhaps this is why Little Blood Brother never returned to the Citadel after its demonstration? His staff, his ring, his very robes of office are always more than what they seem—they are the tools of this trade and that had been his special gift; to make his own brand of wizardry out of technology. Few people had understood his vision, but those few had been the finest. Omega...and Little Blood Brother even though the two could have hardly been more different in demeanor and appearance.

Big, booming Omega, proud giant of two noble families and fostered in a third. An unprecedented honor and he often bragged that the only number that was both his triumph and downfall was the Number Three. In less desperate times he would never have allowed himself to be seen in the company of Plebians like Little Blood Brother, but there _were_ minds that transcended class and barrier, and Little Blood Brother had been that. The youngest, he had admired Rassilon and Omega openly and frankly even as he teased them for their mistakes and oversights and stiffnecked old sensibilities. They tolerated him this more than they ever would another, for their own intellectual levels had no other rivals. His people were scattered to the Wastes; remnants of the Old Ones who shook off the slavery of the Pythia and yet without the hatred needed to disavow them wholly. Because of the superstitious twaddle of his caste he had no true name of his own; he could only be identified by the 8th or 9th (depending on your mathematical school of thought) star in the Constellation of the Metalworker, which was in Apex the night of his birth.

To be honest, that period of Time was auspicious—be it the 8th or 9th Star. It was also ephemeral and difficult to track. Not unlike Little Blood Brother's life. Since he had no True House-Name of his own, they'd named him the Little Blood Brother, as they had been Blood Brothers with themselves before discovering him.

Oh, there had been many days when they'd all thought themselves invulnerable and unstoppable, the Great Triumvirate! Many nights filled with endless drinks and debates and scribbles on any scrap of paper they could grab—Omega had begun his Solar negotiations on the table itself, and Little Blood Brother, caught in the moment of his own flash of inspiration, had wound up scrawling the first sketches of his TARDIS logic adaptors on the wall of Rassilon's rented rooms. Rassilon had laughed. The wall was now sectioned out and on display in the Museum of Time, along with that first TARDIS but by now everyone has forgotten the TARDIS was Little Blood Brother's creation. They give Rassilon the full credit. Rassilon lets them.

Rassilon frowns to himself. Even throughout the Great Vampire War and the Season of Ghosts, with plagues and famines and entire worlds cracking under the strain of battle, they had still found the time to be together, and they'd planned and acted and schemed and joked and argued and stayed together. That was how they were supposed to be. Forever. A Triumvirate was supposed to be inviolate; not a matter of discord. Omega's Solar Engineering had been supported by the rest until the risks emerged. Little Blood Brother had protested; Rassilon had encouraged the giant, reminding them all that the creation of power was essential for Gallifrey.

Eventually, Rassilon and Omega won. And Omega was dead, his dream fulfilled but he could never witness it. The Triumvirate still exists, but one of the base-corners of the triangle is now a ghost.

* * *

**One minute after Midnight:**

"You will be careful when you bring him to me. My Little Blood-Brother has gone mad from grief from the loss of our beloved Omega."

The guards' faces freeze in proper sorrow. The pain and loss reflects upon the Court. They love and cherish Rassilon as the brave mind who took over in the agonizing loss of the Solar Engineer's Death. They know of Little Blood Brother's mourning and how he threw himself into the Wastelands in a penance of grief stretching through the centuries. They love him as the charitable aesthetic who went amongst their kith and kin, helping and healing and giving easements to those who still suffered from the traumas of the old days.

"Please do, extend to him my apologies for this inconvenience, and have my old friend brought to me with the utmost care—as gently as you would your own relatives."

"Of course, Lord Rassilon!"

"He _must_ be given the best of care." Rassilon persisted urgently. "Until his mind can return to its old brilliance, _we must take steps._ I have prepared an oubliette_; _it should be safe enough. We cannot risk his getting out."

They were willing to believe this, for everyone knew Little Blood Brother was quite capable of any act of courage or mad brilliance—his tactics in the forefront of the Vampire War had been proof enough. Also, it was Rassilon speaking, and urging incarceration and counseling for his surviving Founding Brother. It was bad enough to lose the Great Omega; no one wanted to see their beloved Rassilon sit upon his throne alone bereft of his last close friend, they who made Gallifrey what it was now.

Rassilon watches them bustle out of the door and into the nearest Transmat relay. In his mind he is already plotting what will happen when Little Blood Brother is placed within the Corycion.

So many puzzles for him to solve. So many riddles and problems...he will chafe and howl at first, but he won't be able to resist the attraction. To Little Blood Brother there is no greater offense than to walk away from a mystery. The Unknown must be mastered after all! Rassilon's only worry is...did he create enough riddles? Will it be enough to hold him for a few hundred years—at least five hundred? He could always make more. The Corycion's Falconer will keep him updated on the prisoner's progress, and supply him with the answers to the riddles. And they are good riddles—actual problems that need solving, like the SIDRAT generator's half-lives, or atmospheric influence of a TARDIS force field. It will be a good way of getting Little Blood Brother to work for him again. And it will bring him back to his senses.

But the guards return with alarming speed, and Rassilon feels his hearts dip below his ribs.

"I specifically ordered my Brother to come here without delay."

"My apologies, Lord Rassilon." The Guard bowed from the waist down. "But we must be the bearers of unfortunate news."

"Then give it me, and do not dawdle!"

"My Lord Rassilon...your Brother...is dead."

Rassilon does not move or blink. "How." He asks quietly, already thinking ahead to the salvage of the body and the necessary steps to be taken for resurrection and memory retrieval.

"He...flung himself into the Looms."

Rassilon feels the blood drain from his face. The Looms? A literal unmaking of himself...a genetic unweaving that broke himself down to the basic levels. The pain must have been beyond belief. For to have done this...Rassilon can barely fathom it, and yet the ending is final. Final beyond the concept of any mind before him.

It crosses his mind to wonder if _he_ is responsible for this atrocious ending, but of course he isn't. He was planning a sedentary, _productive_ incarceration where his Brother could have been out of sight and out of mind, deep below the Foundry...but also, given the freedom to continue his little experiments for the sake of Gallifrey. It would have worked beautifully. His work would have continued to benefit Gallifrey...and Rassilon wouldn't have had to worry about his uprising.

Had Little Blood Brother thought the unthinkable? That his closest friend _would_ have sent him to his death? Did he _still_ blame him for Omega? Omega's death had been a miscalculation but they had all known the potential hazards. The three of them had worked together for the stellar manipulation and solar engineering. His Brother's thermodynamic genius had tailored with Rassilon's Temporal Logic to create something new and fascinating. The three of them alone had been brilliant geniuses, but together they had been Demigods.

Rassilon does not know. It is a fact that he misses Omega terribly, but he is also relieved the man is no longer there. He was potentially unstable with his obsessions and his inability to focus on the end results of a project. If he'd survived the Harnessing, he would have been popular enough to compete with Rassilon for the throne.

Rassilon had worked too long and too hard to compete with anyone.

* * *

Time passes. Rassilon creates the Eye of Harmony in the ashes of Omega's memory, and his name grows ever-more glowing than ever. It is easy to share rule with a dead man. They remember the beloved and revered Omega; Rassilon does everything he can to support this worship of the demigod. He gives much of his wealth and attention to keeping Omega's memory alive and whole. Children are loomed, dedicated to him as much as they are to Rassilon—even in the Wastelands, the children who are physically born remember their names and what they did in their behalf.

All of Gallifrey praises Rassilon. The world is still bleeding from its freedom from the Pythia's superstitious shackles. They want a Father. They want a God. Rassilon allows himself to be that being. The Founding Fathers become Demigods. Omega; Rassilon. And Little Blood Brother.

Rassilon proclaims his grief at the loss of his last friend, the last being who ever understood him. It hurts so much he refuses to say his name; cannot bear the sounds of it on another's lips. The Court ceases to mention him. The people follow suit. Gradually, mentions of his name dissolve...His name fades gradually, generation by generation, aided and abetted by the elders unwilling to cause pain in future recollections. Little Blood Brother dissolves into time.

Eventually, the old name fades completely, and his name becomes something else, something new.

He becomes the symbol of everything important ever forgotten on Gallifrey; the unknown factors that wrought her greatest changes...becomes an euphemism for all unknown things that create unexpected outcomes. He becomes the Trickster, the Great Manipulator, the Being hidden in the shadows.

He becomes The Other. Otherstide remains on the night between the 8th and 9th star in the Metalworker's Constellation, a holiday that itself passes to obscurity among all but the self-obscure; The Outsiders, the Shobogans who rebel for its own sake, the Karn, and the outcasts and history-minded Houses.

Rassilon says nothing; it suits him in the long scheme of things.

Sometimes he wonders if he did the right thing, consigning the Other's TARDIS to the museum instead of just decommissioning it for scrap and cannibalization, but Rassilon has learned to fear a few things and one is _still_ the Great Vampire King. As long as the fiend remains undiscovered, _any_ TARDIS in possession of the Vampire coding should be kept alive so long as they were salvageable.

Besides, he tells himself, it would be a waste of equity to throw away any prototype.

Time soon proves the wisdom of his actions. Gallifrey makes more TARDIS models—plenty of them. But only one specific type of TARDIS can accept the Record of Rassilon within its memory, and that is the TARDIS Type-40.

If there was one thing his old, former friend and Brother in Time had done well, it was make a TARDIS.

A pity that he'd put so much of _himself_ into the design; the Type 40s were superior Scouts, but they were clunky and bulky compared to the models drafted no less than 300 years after. They lacked ...panache, were too egalitarian. The controls were humiliatingly simple to operate. They depended on embarrassingly primitive technology to maintain their upkeep and yet they were sentient—far more than the Hand of Omega. They broke down; they quarreled with their pilots; they ignored their clear commands and went where their primary command (to seek trouble) sent them. And they were inconsistent; some of the craft were perfectly biddable examples but not all or even the majority. Not even Rassilon could figure out how they could find threats so easily or so well, but he suspected an alteration in the telepathic circuitry, a remodeling of logic that was willing to take risks and step outside the flight paths—which was Little Blood Brother to the final end.

And then he noticed that when it came to "threats" the Type 40 made no distinction between "threat to Time Lords" and "overall threat." These TARDIS notice all threats that cause trouble throughout the Galaxies.

Time Machines that meddle. How very like his lost Brother.

Millions of years have passed and there is still no sign of his Brother. The Houses remain unchanged. Rassilon finds himself watching certain Houses more than others; Redloom. Oakdown. House of Jade Dreamers. Lungbarrow concerns him the most but he can't say precisely why, save for the geography of it; Little Blood Brother loved to sit in the slopes of Lung and watch the world, watch the throngs come and go below his eyes. Lung, he had often said, had inspired him more than any teacher or book of learning.

But Lungbarrow seems normal enough. Its children are loomed with his opalescent eyes and their creativity sends them straight to the Prydori more than any other...their excellent minds nicely suited for the most important work of clerical research, teaching, schooling, and politics. Eventually Rassilon grows a little paranoid because there is no emergence of Little Blood Brother's fantastic, shimmering, glimmering mind.

And there _should_ be.

Death is but a Door.

That mind had been so brilliant, so precious and priceless...to be lost forever? He couldn't fathom the notion. Gallifrey needed Little Blood Brother.

Rassilon needed him.

Rassilon still watches, from time to time, but millions of years pass and the worst Lungbarrow ever produces is the occasional dropout; overall their achievements are admirable and stultifyingly dull. They make good administrators, recorders, computechnicians, logicians.

Rassilon is relieved, really.

Honest.

But there are times when he stands in front of the latest crowd of young scholars in their bright robes, that he catches himself looking extra hard for something, someone else besides who he sees.

He expects to see someone in particular. A being smaller than himself (and certainly smaller than the giant Omega). Smaller and quicker and quick to laugh and to smile, his untamable hair falling forward over his face as his dark green eyes glow, catching the lights and freckles of illumination off the moons and suns.

A cleanshaven face with an imperfect nose, and wild, thick hair that changed colors with the seasons and regenerations, finally going white as the snows of the Death Zone. A head that matches an ever-restless body, always moving and changing and never staying put for long. He looks every year among the graduates for that stubborn jaw meant for thrusting and fierce dark brows, and long-fingered, beautiful hands meant for mechanics and music...a voice that could rise and fall, ebb and flow with the occasion and project like a skilled performer into each situation with a master's grasp of diplomacy and manipulation—a range from great, booming laughs to soft, sibilant whispers. Sometimes Little Blood Brother was not so little, but he was always smaller than Rassilon and Omega; Rassilon doubted that would ever change. He always teased them both for being "Big, Clumsy Giants of Old," for they were large-bodied with the genetics of their Noble Houses. In contrast, Little Blood Brother had been cheerfully Old-Time, with his body up to potluck and chance.

He was a man who loved cats and first called them Calculating Animal with Tail, and tinkered with thermodynamic engineering for fun; who forgave himself for being poor and shabby-clothed but never liked to not be clever; who joked about being the smartest man in any room and who was always playing some sort of musical instrument or humming or singing or tapping out a rhythm to a melody that only he could hear. His voice was always beautiful, always a well-modulated instrument of melody and inflection.

A man who campaigned tirelessly and tiresomely on behalf of others, and could listen for hours, forgetting to rest and eat as other people spoke, content to be one of the invisible. Rassilon sore misses their eternal quarrels and knowing that even in their most bitter fights, Little Blood Brother was still there, never far away, ready to be there if needed.

But Time tells. It always does. If Little Blood Brother will return, it will not be before Rassilon goes to his pre-arranged rest.

Rassilon wonders if this is somehow engineered, that his former Brother's enmity has been great enough that he refuses to return to physicality as long as Rassilon stays in this plane of existence. There was just enough of the wild, fey Pythia genes in the little man to do just that; if Rassilon had less pride he would have swallowed it long enough to scry for his remnants. But...he does not. And questions remain unanswered.

At last...Rassilon lets go of a few pieces of the past. He weighs the pros and cons of his Brother's prototype TARDIS, and quietly switches it for another TARDIS slotted for decommission. He would prefer to destroy it (Her; Brother insisted it was female, that throwback-old-Pythian!), but that would gain attention if not a few lifted eyebrows. Eventually the technicians will get around to taking her apart, and she'll dissolve, piece by piece, into the newer models...an unmaking as thorough and as final as her owner had unmade himself inside the Genetic Looms.

More centuries pass. Rassilon grows old in his last body. He could have seized a criminal's or re-spun a regeneration for himself, but he is tired of waiting. He has seen everything he ever wanted come to fruition. The Time Lords are Lords. They are great. There will never be another people that will reach so high. He chooses to leave on this high note; he goes to his final resting place, setting in motion the Game of Rassilon as he shuts the last door. He will rest.

Until it is time to return.

Rassilon sleeps, for Death is But a Door.

Waiting.

Rassilon sealed the door behind him in the Tower, but he never sealed the Oubliette prepared for Little Blood Brother. It would mean something final, that he would have to admit that that wonderful, brilliant being is never coming back. He'd given the Falconer things to do, matters to occupy its mind, and puts the whole thing (mostly) out of his head and concentrated on his duties as Sole Supreme Ruler of Time.

Even when Rassilon went to his Resting Place, he still half-expected to see Little Blood Brother.

Even though Little Blood Brother is no longer the name by which he's known.

Rassilon is not happy about the complete lack of closure, but he Sleeps assured that his secrets remain his.

And the Oubliette waits.

Its Falconer waits.

The Hand of Omega waits.

And deep in storage, long-forgotten and gathering dust...a TARDIS waits.


End file.
